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[Illustration: "_Plays are put up in packages and sold at the
delicatessen shops_"]




    THE FOOTLIGHTS FORE AND AFT

    BY

    CHANNING POLLOCK


    WITH 50 FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY
    WARREN ROCKWELL

    RICHARD G. BADGER
    THE GORHAM PRESS
    BOSTON


    Copyright 1911 by Richard G. Badger

    All Rights Reserved


    The articles that make up this volume originally appeared, at
    various times, in Collier's Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post,
    The Associated Sunday Magazines, The Smart Set, Munsey's
    Magazine, Ainslee's Magazine, Smith's Magazine, and The Green
    Book Album. The author desires to thank the editors of these
    periodicals for permission to republish.

    THE GORHAM PRESS BOSTON, U. S. A.


    TO THE LADY WHO GOES TO THE THEATER WITH ME




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

_Wherein, at union rates, the author performs the common but popular
musical feat known as "blowing one's own horn"_

THE THEATER AT A GLANCE

_Being a correspondence school education in the business of the
playhouse that should enable the veriest tyro to become a Charles
Frohman or a David Belasco_

SOME PEOPLE I'VE LIED ABOUT

_Being reminiscences of the author's nefarious but more or less
innocuous career as a press agent_

THE WRITING AND READING OF PLAYS

_Being a discussion as to which pursuit is the more painful, with
various entertaining and instructive remarks as to the method of
following both_

THE PERSONALITIES OF OUR PLAYWRIGHTS

_Being an effort to outdo Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D.
Roberts at their own game--which is speaking literally_

STAGE STRUCK

_Being a diagnosis of the disease, and a description of its symptoms,
which has the rare medical merit of attempting a cure at the same
time_

ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY

_Being an account of intrepid explorations in the habitat of the
creatures whose habits are set forth in the preceding chapters_

WHAT HAPPENS AT REHEARSALS

_Being something about the process by which performances are got ready
for the pleasure of the public and the profit of the ticket
speculators_

THE ART OF "GETTING IT OVER"

_Being the sort of title to suggest a treatise on suicide, whereas, in
point of fact, this chapter merely confides all that the author
doesn't know about acting_

SOMETHING ABOUT FIRST NIGHTS

_Wherein is shown that the opening of a new play is more hazardous
than the opening of a jack-pot, and that theatrical production is a
game of chance in comparison with which roulette and rouge-et-noir are
as tiddledewinks or old maid_

IN VAUDEVILLE

_Being inside information regarding a kind of entertainment at which
one requires intelligence no more than the kitchen range_

WITH THE PEOPLE IN STOCK

_Concerning Camille, ice cream, spirituality, red silk tights, Blanche
Bates, Thomas Betterton, second-hand plays, parochialism, matinee
girls, Augustin Daly, and other interesting topics_

SITTING IN JUDGMENT WITH THE GODS

_Being an old manuscript with a new preface--the former dealing with a
lost art, and the latter subtly suggesting who lost it_

THE SMART SET ON THE STAGE

_Wherein the author considers comedies of manners, and players who
succeed illy in living up to them_




ILLUSTRATIONS


PAGE

_Plays are Put up in Packages_

_First catch your play_

_If actors roamed about at will_

_A Stalwart Individual pushing a church_

_The guild of Annanias_

_Anna Held bathing in milk_

_Sometimes things really do happen to actors_

_The Theatrical Women's Parker Club_

_It is very difficult to identify a good play_

_A woman cut her play in half_

_Clyde Fitch's ability to work_

_Augustus Thomas shouts instructions_

_Eugene Walter was lodging upon a park bench_

_Margaret Mayo built a villa_

_The malignant disease_

_"You're William A. Brady, ain't you?"_

_A wrinkled old lady confided her desire_

_How sweet to meet one's own image_

_The Great White Way is a recumbent letter I_

_The actor and the rest of the world_

_Allan Dale came three nights running_

_Gets eighteen dollars_

_If actors really "felt their parts"_

_The first time the director has seen them_

_The interruption came on the spot_

_Matches that cannot be lit_

_Ensconced in a swing and two silk stockings_

_Thought seems as material a thing as a handball_

_Gillette flicked the ashes from his cigar_

_Lady Macbeth swore that he grew during the performance_

_A playwright whose stock has soared a hundred points in a single
evening_

_A Boston audience at train time_

_Trilby died in every known way_

_The author--as you imagine him, and as he is_

_Venus rose from the sea_

_Danced before a statue of Antony until it bit her_

_You need bring to a vaudeville theatre nothing but the price of
admission_

_Their agents search every capital of Europe_

_Known as a stock company_

_Master Betterton had his nerves shaken_

_The actress giving time to dress-makers_

_Evening up matters on his books_

_The great actors of an earlier time_

_A play censor with a club_

_Reputable scoundrels kill by machinery_

_Comstockians wear blinders_

_The peculiarities of royal love-making_

_The lady may have come to prepare a rarebit_

_Why women sin_

_It simply isn't done_




AN INTRODUCTION

     Wherein, at union rates, the author performs the common but
     popular musical feat known as "blowing one's own horn."


"Good wine", according to the poet, "needs no bush." With the same
logic, one may argue that a good book needs no introduction.... But
then--how be sure that it _is_ a good book?

Hallowed custom provides that every volume of essays--especially of
essays on the theater--shall begin with a preface in which some
celebrated critic dilates upon the cleverness of the author. However,
celebrated critics are expensive, and, moreover, no one else seems to
know as much about the cleverness of this author as does the author
himself. In consequence of which two facts, I mean to write my own
introduction.

One obstacle appears to be well-nigh insurmountable. It will be easy
to inform you as to my merits and my qualifications, but I don't
quite see how a man can speak patronizingly of himself. And, of
course, the patronizing tone is absolutely essential to an
introduction. Nobody ever wrote an introduction without it. I shall do
my best, but I hope you will be lenient with me in the event of
failure.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Of the making of books there is no end."

And, even to the most enthusiastic student of the stage, it must seem
that a sufficiently large number of these books deal with the theater.

At least, they deal with the drama--which is slightly different. It is
in this difference that one finds some excuse for the appearance of
"The Footlights--Fore and Aft." Here are a collection of papers in
which the reader finds no keen analysis of plays and players; no
learned review of the past of the playhouse, no superior criticism of
its present, no hyperbolean prophecy for its future. The book, in
fact, is unique.

One might wish, indeed, that there were more substance to these
essays, which reveal the impressions of a reporter rather than the
excogitations of a thinker or a philosopher. Mr. Pollock severely lets
alone the drama of Greece and Rome. His field is the drama of
Forty-second Street and Broadway. He has rendered unto Brander
Matthews the things that are Brander Matthews', and unto William
Winter the things that are William Winter's.

"The Footlights--Fore and Aft" contains nothing that might not have
been set down by anyone with a sense of humor and the author's
opportunities of observation. It is true that, in his case, these
opportunities have been exceptional. Born in 1880, Mr. Pollock's
contact with the theater began as early as 1896, when he became
dramatic critic of the The Washington Post. Subsequently, he served in
the same capacity with various newspapers and magazines, was reporter
for a "trade journal" of "the profession", and acted, for a
considerable period, as press agent and business manager. The
practical side of play-making and play-producing he has learned in
eight years' experience as a dramatist, during which time he has
written ten dramatic pieces, among them "The Pit", "Clothes", "The
Secret Orchard", "The Little Gray Lady", "In the Bishop's Carriage",
and "Such a Little Queen."

Considering the narrow confines of the world he describes, its
comparatively small population and its rather meager language, Mr.
Pollock should not be blamed too much for a certain sameness
throughout "The Footlights--Fore and Aft." There are not more than a
dozen prominent managers and a score of well known playwrights in
America; whoever elects to write a hundred thousand words about the
theater must choose between mentioning these names repeatedly and
inventing new ones. Nor is it possible to avoid the recurrence of
explanations and instances. You will find something about stage
lighting in "The Theater at a Glance", because it belongs there, and
something more about it in "What Happens at Rehearsals", because much
that follows in this account would not be clear without it. The author
did not flatter himself that you would carry his first description
with you through a hundred pages, and, perhaps, he didn't want you to
spoil a nice book by thumbing back.

In articles written at various times for various readers, there is no
reason to suppose that he devised two phrases where one would serve or
searched for two examples where one would do the work. Undoubtedly,
many of these reiterations were weeded out in the course of
compilation, and, as undoubtedly, many of them remain. All collections
of stories by the same author--especially when they treat of one
subject--are marred by similarity. The remedy for this rests with the
reader, who is recommended to take such books in small doses--say, one
essay every night at bedtime.

Generally speaking, the matter that follows will not be found
unpalatable. At least, the author gives us no reason to suspect that
he is displeased with it or with himself. "The capital I's", as
someone has said of another series of articles, "flash past like
telegraph poles seen from a car window." Mr. Pollock scolds
considerably, too, though, for the most part, in perfect good humor.
Indeed, whatever their faults, it must be said that these essays
display some wit, and a rather delightful lightness of touch and
brightness of manner. They penetrate the recesses of the topic, giving
an agreeable impression of confidence, of familiarity, and of
authority.

Books and plays are judged by their price and pretence. With the price
of this book neither the author nor the prefacer has anything to do.
It pretends to very little, and, judged by that standard, it may be
acquitted.

    CHANNING POLLOCK.

    The Parsonage, Shoreham, L. I.,
    August 25, 1911.




THE FOOTLIGHTS FORE AND AFT

I

THE THEATER AT A GLANCE

     Being a correspondence school education in the business of the
     playhouse that should enable the veriest tyro to become a
     Charles Frohman or a David Belasco.


A man who passed as the possessor of reasonable intelligence--he
"traveled for" a concern that manufactured canning machinery, and his
knowledge of tins was something beautiful--once said to me: "Are plays
written before they're produced?"

"No," I replied, indulging myself in a little sarcasm; "they're put up
in packages and sold at the delicatessen shops. Comedies cost twenty
cents a box and dramas from twenty-five cents to half a dollar. It
would be a great field for you, old chap, if you could induce a
fellow like Augustus Thomas to pack his plays in cans."

Even my friend the "drummer" saw through that. I'm afraid my wit lacks
subtlety. Still, two or three other people of my acquaintance would
have been a bit uncertain whether to take me seriously or not. Most
laymen, though they wouldn't believe in the package explanation,
cherish a vague idea that theatrical presentations are miracles
brought into being by the tap of the orchestra conductor's wand.
Managers are quite willing to foster this opinion, agreeing with the
late Fanny Davenport, who felt that the charm of the playhouse lay in
its mystery, and that to elucidate would result in loss of patronage.
In this verdict it is impossible for me to concur. I learn something
new about the theater every day, and the more I learn the more I love
it. You can't interest me in a thing of which I am ignorant--at least,
not unless you start to clear up my ignorance.

Henry Arthur Jones, writing about "The Renascence of the English
Drama," observes: "I wish every playgoer could know all the tricks
and illusions of the stage from beginning to end. I wish that he could
be as learned in all the devices and scenic effects of the stage as
the master carpenter.... Compare the noisy, ill-judged, misplaced
applause of provincial audiences with the eager, unerring enthusiasm
and appreciation of the audience at a professional matinee, where, so
far as the acting goes, everyone knows the precise means by which an
effect is produced, and, therefore, knows the precise reward it should
receive." That's warrant enough for me.

The theater is an extremely curious blending of art and business. Its
art is lodged back of the curtain line and its business in front of
the footlights. Between these two boundaries the manager stands when
he is directing rehearsals, and, since his work is a mixture of both
things, that four feet of cement constitutes a sort of intellectual
no-man's-land. The people of the stage and the people in "the front of
the house" have little in common, that little being chiefly a mutual
feeling of contempt for each other.

You know the recipe for cooking a rabbit--"first catch your rabbit."
The same recommendation applies in the matter of producing a play.
Good plays are the one thing in the world, except money, the demand
for which exceeds the supply. Consequently, dramatic works cost a
trifle more than "twenty cents a box." Most managers think they cost
altogether too much, but there never has been advanced a completely
satisfactory reason why an illiterate little comedian should be paid
more for appearing in a piece that makes him a success than the author
should be paid for providing a piece that all the illiterate little
comedians on earth couldn't make a success if the vehicle itself
weren't attractive.... Kyrle Bellew in "The Thief" drew $10,000 a
week; Kyrle Bellew in "The Scandal" didn't draw $4,000; that's the
answer.

If you were a manager and wanted a play by a well-known author you
would go to his agent--Elisabeth Marbury or Alice Kauser--and ask
if he had time to write it. Should his reply be in the affirmative,
you probably would pay him $250 for attaching his name to a contract
stipulating that the manuscript must be delivered on such and such a
date. Before that time, he would send you a scenario, or brief
synopsis, of his story. If you accepted that, you would give the
author another $250; if you rejected it, all would be over between
you. The acceptance of the completed "'script" would be likely to cost
you an additional $500, and the whole $1,000 would be placed to your
credit and deducted from the first royalties accruing to the
dramatist.

[Illustration: "_First catch your play_"]

Authors' royalties usually are on "a sliding scale." Such a one as we
have in mind might get 5 per cent. of the first $4,000 that came into
the box office; 7 per cent. of the next $3,000, and 10 per cent. of
all in excess of that total. Thus, the playwright's income from a
production that "did $8,000" a week would be $510. The agent would
take 10 per cent. of this sum. Some dramatists receive better terms
than these and some get worse; I have given the average. It is
possible for an author to profit by such a property as "The Lion and
the Mouse," which has been acted pretty constantly by two or more
companies, to the extent of a quarter of a million dollars.
Occasionally, a shrewd manager and an author without experience or
self-confidence make a deal by which a play is sold outright. This is
an unpleasant subject.

"How does the dramatist know the receipts of his play?" you ask. From
a copy of the statement by which the manager knows. Did you ever hear
of the operation called "counting up?" About an hour after the
performance begins, the affable young man who takes your money through
the box office window counts the tickets he has left, and subtracts
the number of each kind from that which he had originally. The result
is the number sold. That number is written on a report handed to the
manager of the company appearing in the theater by which the young man
is employed. He and the young man then count the sold tickets taken
from the boxes into which you see them slipped when you give them to
the official at the door. That result should be precisely the figure
on the report. If it is greater the young man pays for the difference;
if it is less nothing is said, since some people who bought tickets
may have remained away. The statement of what has been disposed of, at
what price, and with what total, is then signed jointly by the
representative of the house and the representative of the company.
Each keeps a copy of this statement and an additional copy is sent to
the agent of the author. The transaction seems simple, but, if you
will think the matter over, you will see that it is a nearly perfect
method of preventing dishonesty.

The contract made between manager and author ordinarily provides that
a play must be performed before a given date and so many times a year
thereafter, in default of which all rights revert to the dramatist.
One of the first requisites of a production now-a-days is scenery.
Consequently, supposing still that you are the manager, you turn over
your manuscript, act by act, to a scene painter, or to a number of
scene painters, expressing your ideas on the subject, if you have any.
The scene painter reads the play, formulates some ideas of his own,
familiarizes himself with the time and place treated, and makes a
model of each setting. The model is a miniature, usually on the scale
of an inch to a foot, and it incorporates the necessaries described by
the author with the luxuries imagined by the manager. Moreover, it is
as accurate and beautiful as skill can make it. If the producer
approves of the model a bargain is struck, a builder constructs the
frame work which is to hold the scenery, the painter covers the
canvas, and, for a while, at least, the matter of settings is off your
mind. The setting of an act may cost $500 and it may cost $5,000.
Generally, it comes to about $1,000.

In a play of modern life the actors are supposed to furnish their own
costumes. Sometimes, when the dresses are to be exceptionally
elaborate, this rule is varied. Should your property be a romantic
drama or a comic opera, however, you have a conference with a
costumer. The great producers, like the Shuberts and Klaw and
Erlanger, maintain their own establishments, but this hardly will
apply in your case. Now you will see costume plates instead of scene
models--little paintings on card-board that frequently are exhibited
in front of the theater in which the piece is running. These once
passed upon, the contract for making the clothes will be let.
Naturally, the cost is governed by the number of persons to be clad
and by the nature of their garb. The gowns worn by one woman in the
production of a Clyde Fitch society comedy came to $3,100. The
costumes for a comic opera may foot up $20,000, irrespective of
tights, stockings, slippers and gloves, which principals and chorus
girls are obliged to find.

Engaging a company is a simple matter in comparison to what it used to
be. A few years ago you would have been compelled to choose from
thousands of applicants and to make personal visits to an actors'
agency--say, Mrs. Packard's or Mrs. Fernandez'. Now metropolitan
casts are composed chiefly of well known people. You have seen these
people often, you know what they can do, you select them with an eye
to round pegs and square holes, and you write to them or their
representatives. In a week your cast is ready. Salaries range from
$400 a week, paid to a popular leading man or woman, to $20 a week,
the stipend of a player of bits. Chorus girls usually get $18, though
especially handsome "show girls" are worth as much as $60. Your star
probably insists on having from $300 to $500, and a percentage of the
profits.

A stage manager is the man who does the thinking for actors. He
directs rehearsals, devises "business" and effects, and often has a
great deal more to do with the play than the author himself. Any
author will tell you that this was true in the case of a failure; any
stage manager will tell you it was true in the case of a success. In
all seriousness, a stage manager is a mighty important individual. If
actors roamed about at will in a play, as most laymen suppose they
do, you couldn't tell a first night performance from a foot-ball game.
Every actor in a piece knows just where he must stand when a certain
line is spoken, and when, how, where and in what manner he must move
to get in position for the next line. Smooth premieres are not
accidents; they are designs. Sometimes, as in the case of David
Belasco, producers are their own stage managers. Frequently, as with
Charles Klein, authors stage their own plays. Almost always they have
something to do with it.

[Illustration: "_If actors roamed about at will you couldn't tell a
first night performance from a football game_"]

The chorus of a musical comedy or a comic opera rehearses apart from
the principals, and begins earlier. Putting on a piece like this is
more difficult than putting on a legitimate comedy or a drama, and
such a director as Julian Mitchell or R. H. Burnside may be paid
$15,000 a year. The production of a "straight play" often is piece
work, bringing about $500 for each piece. Costumes, scenery and
properties are unknown until the last rehearsal. Two chairs represent
a door or a sofa or a balcony in the minds of everyone concerned.
"What is the woman doing on the bench?" I inquired once at a stock
company rehearsal of "Mr. Barnes of New York."

"That isn't a bench," the manager replied. "That's a train of cars
just leaving the railroad station at Milan."

While these things are going on in borrowed theaters or rented halls,
two departments in your enterprise are preparing other details of the
business. First, there is your booking agent. His task, like the
matter of engaging a company, has been simplified. Formerly, he wrote
to the manager of the theater you wanted in every city you wanted to
play, and kept on writing until he had contracted for a route that
would not involve your jaunting from Philadelphia to Chicago and then
back to Baltimore on your way to St. Louis. Railway fares, even at two
cents each per mile and one baggage car with every twenty-five
tickets, eat up profits. Now-a-days your booking agent goes to the
booking agent of one of the two big syndicates, each of which
represents half of the theatres in the country, and that gentleman
arranges a route while you wait. Sometimes it may not be a route worth
waiting for, but that is determined by your importance and the
estimated drawing power of your attraction. Theaters are "played on
shares", the shares depending again upon the drawing power of your
attraction and upon the size of the city booked. In Chicago you will
get 50 per cent. of the receipts; in Newark 60 per cent; in
Springfield or New Haven 70 per cent. A New York house keeps 50 per
cent. and, unless your production seems promising, you will be obliged
to guarantee that the theater's share will not fall below a certain
figure.

Next, there is your press agent. He used to be a newspaper man, and he
is worth $100 a week or not more than a dollar and a quarter. In his
office is a stenographer, a mimeographing machine, and a list of six
hundred daily newspapers. If he is worth $100 he knows just what each
of those newspapers will print and what it will not. It is his
business to cover a pound of advertising so completely with an ounce
of news that the whole parcel will not be consigned to the
waste-basket. Out in Milwaukee and over in Boston you have observed
journalistic items like these:

     Augustus Thomas is at work on a new play for Charles Frohman.
     The piece is to be called "The Jew," and will be produced in
     September.

That's the press agent!

He also designs bills, gets up circulars, sends out photographs,
invents "fake stories", and takes the blame for whatever happens that
shouldn't have happened. If you have several attractions you will need
a press agent in New York and one with each company on the road. In
the parlance of the profession, the road press agent is "the man ahead
of the show," while the acting manager is "the man back with the
show." The terms are self-explanatory. "The man back with the show"
keeps the books, "counts up," pays salaries, "jollies" the star, and
maintains communication with his principal. During the course of your
connection with the theatrical business you will have dealings also
with the advertising agent, who supervises the posting of bills; the
transfer companies, which haul your production to and from playhouses
and railway stations; and scores of other people. You must learn about
them from experience.

The stage is a land of wonders the geography of which must be pretty
thoroughly understood before you can receive any idea as to the
working of the miracles that occur in the ten minutes the curtain is
down between acts. Of course, you know that the opening through which
you witness the performance of a play is called the proscenium arch.
The space between the base of this arch and the footlights is known as
the "apron." That region into which you have seen canvas disappear
when it is hauled up from the stage is the "flies." Directly under
the roof is a floor or iron grating from which are suspended the
pulleys that bear the weight of this "hanging stuff," and that floor,
for obvious reasons, is called the "gridiron." The little balcony
fastened to the wall at one side of the stage or another is the "fly
gallery." The loose ends of the ropes attached to the "hanging stuff"
are fastened here, and it is from this elevation that the "stuff"
aforesaid is lifted and lowered. Scenery is of two kinds--"drops" and
"flats." Of the latter more anon. "Drops" are curtains of any sort on
which are painted the reproductions of exteriors or interiors, and one
of the ordinary size weighs about two hundred pounds. In common with
everything else suspended in the "flies," these "drops" are
counterweighted, so that a couple of men can move them with ease. The
other things suspended may be "flies," or "borders," which are painted
strips that prevent your seeing any farther up than you are expected
to see; "ceiling pieces," platforms, and "border lights," which are
tin tubes as long as the stage is wide, open at the bottom, and
filled with incandescent globes of various colors for illuminating
from above.

"Flats" are pieces of painted canvas tacked on a framework of wood. In
the old days these were held in position by "grooves," or combinations
of little inverted troughs that fitted over the tops of the "flats."
These "grooves" were in sets four or five feet apart running along
both sides of the stage, and their position gave to various parts of
that platform designations that are used still in giving directions in
play manuscripts. Thus, "L.2.E.," or "Left second entrance," is the
space between the first and second of these sets on the left of the
stage. The long "flats," slid in to join in the center and make the
rear wall of a dwelling, for example, constituted "_the_ flat" and the
short ones on your right or left were "wings." Then a room could be no
other shape than square or oblong, and the doors and windows had to be
in certain specified places, no matter where they would have been in a
real house. It is laughable now to consider how this purely physical
condition limited the dramatist.

At the present time the building of a house with "flats" is not unlike
building one with cards. Each "flat" is placed where it is desired and
held up from behind by a "brace," one end of which is screwed to the
setting and the other to the floor. That particular "flat" is then
lashed to its neighbors with a "tab line," much as you lace your
shoes. When the walls have been constructed in this way, with doors
and windows wherever they are wanted, a ceiling is lowered from the
"fly gallery," and the dwelling is complete. If you are supposed to
see a landscape through the window, a "drop" on which a landscape has
been painted is lowered t'other side of the rear wall. An "interior
backing," representing the wall of another room, usually is in the
form of a large screen standing behind the door where it is needed.
Corners of this kind are illuminated by "strip lights," or electric
lamps placed on a strip of wood and hung in place.

Stage lighting has undergone a complete revolution in the past few
years, the step from incandescent lamps to calciums meaning even more
than the step from gas to electric lamps. Formerly, the illumination
came from the footlights and the "borders" exclusively; the sun rose
and set directly over-head in open defiance of the Copernican theory.
Now the stage is full of minature trap doors, and to the metal beneath
these may be attached wires that will throw light from anywhere. There
is a "bridge" in the "first entrance" on the "prompt side" on which
sits a man with apparatus to reproduce almost any effect known to
Nature. You have seen the busy and important individual who controls
"lamps" in the dress circle or the gallery, and without doubt you have
observed that nowadays there is very little to keep such a stage
manager as David Belasco from doing whatever he pleases with his
electricity.

There are five classes of men at work on the stage, all under the
direct supervision of the master carpenter. The men in these classes
are known as "flymen," "grips," "clearers," "property men" and
electricians. Each of these has his own labor to accomplish, and goes
at it without loss of time or regard to the others. The "flymen" haul
up and lower whatever hangs in the "flies." The "grips" attend to any
scenery that must be set up or pulled down. The "clearers" take away
the furniture and accessories that have been used, and the "property
men" substitute other furniture and accessories from the "property
room." The work of the electricians has been explained. In these days
of elaborate calcium effects, there must be a man at each "lamp."

All these matters are attended to as though by machinery. When the
curtain has fallen on the star's last bow, the stage manager cries
"Strike!" This cry means labor trouble of a very different sort from
that usually created by a call to strike. The stage immediately
becomes a small pandemonium. The crew in the "fly gallery" works like
the crew on a yard arm during a yacht race, hauling wildly at a
greater number of ropes than were ever on a ship. In consequence of
their energy, trees and houses soar into the air as though by magic.
Samson wasn't such a giant, after all. He only pulled down a
building--these fellows pull buildings _up_!

They are not mightier, however, than their colleagues, the "grips."
There walks a stalwart individual carrying a folded balcony or pushing
along the whole side of a church. Another permits a porch to collapse
and fall into his out-stretched arms. How useful these "grips" would
have been in San Francisco! Meanwhile, the "clearers" and "property
men" have been mixing things up in great shape. The last act was an
interior; the next is to be an exterior. Consequently, you note a fine
spot of lawn growing directly under a horsehair sofa and the trunk of
a huge oak reclining affectionately against a chest of drawers.
Gradually, the signs of indoor life disappear, and then, suddenly,
springing out of absolute chaos, you see a forest or a broad public
square. The "lamps" sputter a moment and blaze up, bathing the scene
in the warm red of sunset or the pale blue of moonlight. "Second act!"
screams the call-boy, running from dressing room door to dressing room
door. The stage manager presses a button connected with a signal light
in front of the orchestra conductor, and you hear the purr of the
incidental music. He presses another button once--twice. "Buzz!"
hisses something in the "fly-gallery," and "buzz!" again. The curtain
lifts and the play is continued. Everything has been done in perfect
order. Even now the stage manager stands in the "first entrance,"
pencil in hand, noting the exact moment at which the act began, the
minute at which each song was sung, and how many encores it received.
You--my friend, the manager--will get that report to-morrow morning.

Here, omitting a dictionary of details, you have the theater at a
glance. I feel tempted, like the magician after he has garbled some
explanation of a difficult trick, to say: "Now, ladies and gentlemen,
you can go home and do it yourselves." But you can't. I couldn't.
The thousands of important trifles, the thousands of quick decisions
that must be made and of clever things that must be done--these are
the results of genius and work and of long, long experience. Many an
American who has "French at a Glance" on the tips of his fingers, so
to speak, has to cackle in imitation of a hen when he wants to get a
soft-boiled egg in Paris.

[Illustration: _"A stalwart individual pushing along the side of a
church_"]




_SOME PEOPLE I'VE LIED ABOUT_

    Being reminiscences of the author's nefarious, but more
    or less innocuous career as a press agent.


A press agent, as you may have gathered from the preceding article, is
a person employed to obtain free newspaper advertising for any given
thing, and the thing usually is a theatrical production. This
advertising he is supposed to get as the Quaker was advised to get
money--honestly, if possible. Since it isn't often possible, the press
agent may be described in two words as a professional liar.

There is neither malice nor "muck rake" in this assertion. The press
agent knows that his business is the dissemination of falsehood, and
he is proud of it. Go up to any member of the craft you find on
Broadway and say to him: "You are a liar!"; you will see a smile of
satisfaction spread itself over his happy face, and his horny hand
will grasp yours in earnest gratitude. Victor Hugo and Charles
Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray were liars, too, according to
his way of thinking, and not overly ingenious or entertaining liars,
at that. Their fiction was spread upon the pages of books, as his is
spread upon the pages of the daily journals, and their mission, like
his, was the enlivening of a terribly dull little planet. This
altruistic motive really lurks behind the prevarications of the press
agent with imagination. He conceives his philanthropic duty to be the
making of news to fill a demand largely in excess of the supply. If
the pursuit of this purpose brings him an income hovering about that
of a United States Senator he cannot be blamed.

I became one of the guild of Annanias some ten or eleven years ago,
coming fresh from the position of dramatic critic on _The Washington
Times_, and I think I may say without undue egotism that, during the
period of my membership, I lied industriously, conscientiously, and
with a fair degree of success. There have been and are more able
falsifiers than I, but the confessions of one man cannot in honor
include the deeds of another, and so I must omit them from this
chronicle. Suffice it to say that the stories of Anna Held's bathing
in milk, of Mrs. Patrick Campbell having tan bark spread in the street
in front of the Theater Republic to deaden the rumbling that annoyed
her during performances, and a score similar in nature remain
conspicuous examples of the cleverness manifested by brilliant press
agents in attracting attention to the actors and actresses in whose
behalf they labored.

The successful launching of a "fake"--so they are known to the
profession--like these is not at all the simple matter it would appear
to be. The mere conception of the story is only the beginning of the
task. It is not enough to decide that such and such a thing might
happen, or to swear that it has happened; it must be made to happen.
Moreover, the occurrence must be so natural, and the plans leading to
it so carefully laid and concealed, as to prevent suspicion and baffle
investigation. Whenever it is possible, the press agent should be
ostensibly unconnected with the affair, and, whenever it is not, he
must hide his knowledge behind a mask of innocence in comparison with
which the face of Mary's little lamb looks like a selection from the
rogues' gallery.

[Illustration: "_The guild of Annanias_"]

There are other requisites to the spinning of a yarn which shall be
valuable in an advertising way. In the first place, it is necessary
that the story shall not injure the reputation or lower the standing
of its hero or heroine, and equally desirable that it shall have no
"come back" that may make enemies for the press agent. The
announcement that Mrs. Patrick Campbell had won a large sum from
society women at bridge whist, made during an engagement of the star
in New York, was given all kinds of space in the newspapers, but it
brought down upon Mrs. Campbell's devoted head such scathing
denunciation from press and pulpit that she lost no time in sending
out a denial. The publicity given the matrimonial enterprises of De
Wolf Hopper, through no fault of his advertising staff, seriously
injured that capable comedian for a time. A good "fake" is bizarre and
picturesque enough to be interesting, will defy the prober after
truth, hurts no one and so creates no journalistic grudges to be
fought down in the future. There must be no limit to the number of
times that the press agent can stir up excitement when he calls
"Wolf!"

So many of the stories invented by theatrical Munchausens possess the
qualification first mentioned that it is by no means unusual for the
inventor to take the newspaper man into his confidence. Of course,
before doing this he wants to feel sure of his newspaper and of his
man. Dailies there be that prefer fact to fiction, however prosaic the
former; that treat the stage in so dignified a manner that, if the
Empire Theater burned to the ground, they probably would print the
information under a head reading "The Drama"; that scorn the press
agent and have only contempt for his handiwork. The most rabid of
these, strangely enough, is the very paper that once, for its own
amusement, tried a "fake" about wild animals escaping from Central
Park Zoo which succeeded so well that for twenty-four hours business
was practically suspended in New York. At least half the journals in
town do not inquire too closely into a tale that is likely to appeal
to their readers, especially if the tale in question is obviously
harmless. When the publicity promoter conceals his machinations and
buries clues leading to his connection with a story--"and the same
with intent to deceive"--he must plot with great care, for woe betide
him if the truth leaks out.

[Illustration: "_Anna Held's bathing in milk_"]

An excellent example of the kind of "fake" in accomplishing which one
may rely upon the co-operation of the Fourth Estate is the incident of
Margaret Mayo writing a play in twenty-four hours. Miss Mayo, who
since then has written many plays, notably "Baby Mine" and "Polly of
the Circus," at that time was appearing with Grace George in "Pretty
Peggy" at the Herald Square Theater. The season had been dull, if
profitable, and I was casting about for any item likely to get into
print, when the idea of having someone go Paul Armstrong two better in
rapidity of accomplishment occurred to me. Obviously, it was
impossible to involve Miss George in the episode without making her
appear ridiculous, and so I cast about for a likely member of her
company.

Miss Mayo's name suggested itself to me because of the fact that, even
then, she was at work on several plays, and I obtained her consent to
my plan. Shortly afterward it was announced from the Herald Square
that Miss Mayo had wagered a supper with Theodore Burt Sayre, author
of numerous well known dramas, that she could begin and complete a
four act comedy in the space of a single day. The test was to be made
on the following Sunday at the residence of Miss Mayo, who was to have
the benefit of a stenographer, and, to guard against her using an idea
previously worked out, the advantage of a synopsis furnished by Mr.
Sayre. This synopsis was to be delivered in a sealed envelope at six
o'clock one morning and the play was to be finished at six o'clock
the next. Mr. Sayre, an intimate personal friend, had been furnished
with these details over the telephone, and affirmed them when called
up by the reporters. Our announcement was printed by nearly every
newspaper in town.

The stenographer provided Miss Mayo on that eventful morning was my
own--a bright, quick-witted Irish girl, whose name, unfortunately, I
have forgotten. The synopsis of the play was Miss Mayo's. She had it
made from an old piece of her own, which had been freshly typed a day
or two before. Saturday night, sheets from this manuscript were
generously distributed about the room, the remaining sheets were
hidden in a bureau drawer, the typewriter was put in position, and our
scenery was ready. Business took me to Philadelphia on a late train,
and the beginning of our two little comedies--that to be written and
that to be acted--was entrusted to Miss Mayo.

I got back from the Quaker City shortly after noon on Sunday and went
direct to the scene of action. I rang the front bell, the door opened
automatically, and I climbed the stairs to the apartment. From the
hall I heard a nervous voice and the click of a typewriter. Somebody
admitted me and mine eyes beheld as excellent a counterfeit of fevered
energy as it has ever been their luck to fall upon. Miss Mayo was
pacing the floor wildly, dictating at least sixty words a minute,
while the stenographer bent quiveringly over her machine. That portion
of a manuscript which Arthur Wing Pinero might possibly prepare in six
months lay on the table. The typist broke the charm. "Why!" she
exclaimed; "it's Mr. Pollock!"

"Oh!" said Miss Mayo. "I thought you were a newspaper man. Sit down
and have a biscuit."

This pretence was continued all day. When reporters came we struggled
with the difficulties of rapid-fire composition; when they didn't we
ate biscuits and manifolded epigrams which afterwards were sent to
waiting city editors and quoted as being from the twenty-four hour
play. Miss Mayo was photographed several times and we had a delicious
dinner at six. Afterward, we named our product "The Mart" and
separated for the night. Despite our thin histrionism, there wasn't a
newspaper man among our visitors who didn't know in his secret soul
that the whole thing had been cooked up for advertising purposes, yet,
a newsless Sunday aiding and abetting us, we had more space the next
morning than might have been devoted to the outbreak of a revolution
in France.

Similarly, no intelligent person could have questioned for a moment
the purpose of the matinee which De Wolf Hopper gave "for women only"
soon afterward at the Casino Theater. "Happyland," the opera in which
Mr. Hopper was appearing, made no especial appeal to the gentler sex,
while the presenting company included so many pretty girls that a
performance "for men only" would have been infinitely more reasonable.
As a matter of fact, I first conceived the idea in this form, but
swerved from my course upon taking into account two important
considerations. The announcement of an entertainment "for men only"
must have created the impression that there was something
objectionable about the presentation--an impression we were extremely
anxious to avoid--and it would not have given the opportunities for
humorous writing which we hoped would serve as bait to the reporters.
Foreseeing that upon the obviousness of these opportunities would
depend the amount of attention paid to so palpable an advertising
scheme, we took care to guard against a dearth of incident by
providing our own happenings. Among the number of these were the
entrance of a youth who had disguised himself as a girl in order to
gain admittance, the appearance of a husband who insisted that his
wife must not remain at a performance from which he was barred, and
one or two similar episodes. We found, in the end, that these devices
were superfluous. On the afternoon selected, the interior of the
Casino fairly grinned with femininity, the audience looked like a
Mormon mass meeting multiplied by two, and even so dignified and
important a news-gathering service as the Associated Press
condescended to take facetious notice of the "Women's Matinee."

If you recollect what you read in newspapers, it is not at all
impossible that, even at this date, you will find something familiar
about the name of Marion Alexander. You don't? Perhaps your memory can
be assisted. Miss Alexander was the chorus girl supporting Lillian
Russell in "Lady Teazle" who sued the late Sam S. Shubert for $10,000
because he had said she was not beautiful. The story of this slander
and of the resentment it provoked went all around the world, though it
is unlikely that anyone who printed it was deceived as to the
genuineness of the lady's fine frenzy. The Marion Alexander tale had
all the journalistic attractions of the "Women's Matinee," in that it
was unique and admitted of breeziness in narration, but it had in
addition an advantage that no press agent overlooks--it was
susceptible to illustration. Newspapers always are eager to print
pictures of pretty women. The average New York journal had rather
reproduce a stunning photograph of Trixie Twinkletoes than the most
dignified portrait of Ellen Terry or Ada Rehan. Miss Alexander _was_
pretty--I haven't the least doubt that she still is--and, while this
story was running its course, the Shuberts paid nearly $300 for
photographs used by daily papers, weekly papers, periodicals,
magazines and news syndicates.

In the course of the controversy Miss Russell took occasion to side
with Mr. Shubert--she didn't know she had done so until she read her
paper the next morning--and ventured the opinion that no brunette
could possibly be beautiful. As had been expected, this statement
aroused a storm of protest. There are a million brunettes in New York,
and to say that we succeeded in interesting them is putting it mildly.
When "Lady Teazle" departed for the road they were still writing
indignant letters to _The American and Journal_, and nearly every
letter gave added prominence to Miss Russell. I wrote a few indignant
letters myself and had them copied in long hand by the telephone girls
and stenographers in the building. It is quite needless to say that
Miss Alexander's suit never came to trial.

Twice during my career of prevarication, managing editors became
interested in my humble efforts at the creation of news and demanded
proofs that were not easily manufactured. While "Fantana" was running
at the Lyric Theater, I discovered a chorus girl whose dog wore an
exquisite pair of diamond ear-rings. To be quite accurate, neither the
chorus girl nor the dog had thought of any such adornment when we
three became acquainted, but a ten cent pair of jewels stuck to the
animal's head with chewing gum and the popular belief that "the camera
does not lie" were expected to make the discovery seem convincing. An
iconoclast on _The World_ made it necessary for us to borrow ear rings
from Tiffany's and bore holes in the flesh of a poor little canine
that might never have known what suffering was but for the shocking
skepticism mentioned.

If the beast in this case was martyred in the interest of science--the
science of advertising--the staff of the press department at the Lyric
had its share of agony a little later on. We had sent out ingenuously
a trifling story about what we were pleased to call a "chorus girls'
rogues gallery", detailing the manner in which the records of the
young women were kept on the backs of photographs filed away in a room
arranged for that purpose. _The World_ wanted the tale verified and
inquired blandly if it might send up a reporter to inspect. We replied
with equal politeness that it might--the next day. That afternoon we
bought a rubber stamp and nearly a thousand old pictures, and all
night long six of us worked on a "chorus girls' rogues' gallery" that
would live up to its reputation. Our reward was a page in colors.

Sometimes things really do happen to actors and actresses, and so, not
infrequently, there is a grain of truth in the news printed about
them. Only a grain, mind you, for if a tenth of the events in which
they are supposed to take part were actual, the inevitable end of life
on the stage would be death of nervous prostration. The wide-awake
press agent is quick to plant the grain of truth aforesaid, growing
therefrom stories no more like the originals than a radish is like a
radish seed. Grace George once telegraphed me to Chicago that she
would not open at the Grand Opera House in "Pretty Peggy" on a Sunday.
She felt, quite rightly, that eight performances a week was the limit
of her endurance. Staring at a pile of printed bills announcing an
engagement beginning on the Sabbath, I concluded that this ultimatum
had reached the limit of mine. Then an inspiration. Up went the
original bills, to be covered a day later with others advertising the
first performance for Monday. The newspapers were curious as to why
the change had been made and we were willing, not to say eager, to
satisfy their curiosity. Miss George did not believe in giving
theatrical performances on Sunday. At least a dozen clerygmen read
this and told their congregations about it the day before the
postponed advent of "Pretty Peggy."

[Illustration: "_Sometimes things really do happen to actors_"]

Caught in a blizzard at Oswego, N. Y., eight years ago, I was informed
that the only chance of my joining Miss George that night at Syracuse
lay in making the trip in a special locomotive. That necessity got
printed throughout the country, a vivid description of Miss George
driving an engine through banks of snow in order to reach Syracuse for
her performance of "Under Southern Skies." The woman who actually made
the trip was a waitress from an Oswego hotel and she received $10 for
it.

William A. Brady wanted a thousand girls in September, 1902, for his
Woman's Exhibition at Madison Square Garden. They could have been
obtained without the knowledge of the police, but secrecy was not the
_desideratum_. "Wanted--1000 Women at Madison Square Garden at 8 P. M.
on Friday" was an advertisement which brought down upon us nearly
thrice that number, together with a small army of newspaper reporters
and photographers. This was the first gun fired in a campaign of
advertising for a show during the existence of which we obtained
nearly six hundred columns of space in New York.

Truth is never important in a press agent's story, and there are some
occurrences that he actually suppresses. Accounts of small fires,
accidents, thefts and quarrels do not get into type if he can help it.
Several kinds of news items have been "faked" so often that no one
would attempt to have them mentioned journalistically should examples
of their class really happen. He would be a brave publicity promoter,
for instance, who sent to an editor the tale of his star stopping a
runaway, no matter how firmly the tale might be based on fact. Miss
George had stolen from her a valuable diamond necklace while she was
playing in "Pretty Peggy" and knew better than to permit my sending
out an announcement of the theft. "An Actress Loses Her Diamonds!" You
laugh scornfully at the very idea. The papers no longer publish
accounts of people standing in line before box offices all night in
order to secure good seats in the morning, though I succeeded in
obtaining mention of this feature of Sarah Bernhardt's last engagement
but one in New York by injecting into the yarn a few drops of what
theatrical managers call "heart interest." Five dollars and a little
careful coaching secured for me a picturesque looking old woman who
convinced her inquisitors that she once had acted with the Divine
Sarah in Paris. Her vigil in the lobby of the Lyric received more
attention than did the _bona fide_ line of three thousand persons that
I rose at five to have photographed on the morning following.

This imposter's husband afterward figured at the Casino in the role of
a man whose visit to "Happyland" was the first he had made to a
theater since the night on which he had witnessed the shooting of
Abraham Lincoln. The tale we told was that this spectacle had so
affected him that the soothing influence of forty years was required
to bring him again into the precincts of a playhouse. Interviewed by
the representatives of several journals, he made a comparison between
theatrical performances of ante bellum times and those of today that
could hardly have been more convincing had my confederate's price not
included two seats for the preceding evening at another place of
amusement under direction of the Shuberts. This story, which went the
rounds of the country, cost, all in all, ten minutes work and three
silver dollars. I mention it as an instance of the simple "fake" that
sometimes proves most effective.

An equally simple story, used almost simultaneously, came near being
less inexpensive. Henry Miller was about to produce "Grierson's Way"
at the Princess Theater, and, rehearsals not progressing to his
satisfaction, he determined to postpone the scheduled date of opening.
This determination we resolved upon turning to our own account. We
advertised widely that Mr. Miller had lost the only existing
manuscript of the play, without which the performance could not be
given, and that he would pay $500 reward for its restoration. Two days
afterward Mr. Miller called me up on the telephone. "An awful thing
has happened!" he said. "I've actually lost a manuscript of
'Grierson's Way.'"

"What of it?" I inquired.

"What of it!" echoed Mr. Miller. "Supposing somebody brings the
'script to me and demands that $500?"

Fortunately, "Grierson's Way" was found by a stage hand who was
satisfied with a small bill and an explanation.

It seems hardly probable that anyone will recall how a barber once
delayed the beginning of a performance of "Taps" until half past eight
o'clock, yet that tale was one of the most successful of simple
stories. The only preparation required was posting the chosen
tonsorialist and holding the curtain at the Lyric. Herbert Kelcey,
according to the explanation given out, had been shaved when he
discovered that he did not have the usual fee about him. "I'll pay
you tomorrow," he had remarked. "I'm Herbert Kelcey."

"Herbert Kelcey nuttin'!" his creditor had replied. "Dat gag don't go!
You stay here until you get dat fifteen cents!"

A messenger, hastily summoned, was said to have released the actor
shortly after the hour for "ringing up." The idea that a barber could
keep a thousand people waiting for their entertainment was both novel
and humorous, and, in the vernacular, our story "landed hard." The
strike of the Helen May Butler Military Band at the Woman's Exhibition
was arranged with equal ease and proved equally good. That exhibition
was wonderfully fruitful. Almost anything the women did seemed
amusing, and the show itself was so extraordinary that its smallest
features were interesting.

As elaborate a tale as, for example, the famous Anna Held milk bath
story, to which I have referred, requires more plotting and arranging
than would the founding of a revolutionary society in Russia. One may
spend weeks of work and hundreds of dollars on such a "fake," only to
trace its subsequent failure to some trifling flaw in the chain of
circumstance. Widely though a successful story of this sort may be
chronicled, the reward is absolutely incommensurate with the labor
involved, and I think few press agents would ever attempt one were it
not for a gambler's love of excitement.

It was during Judge Alton B. Parker's presidential campaign that I
evolved what I consider my most magnificent "fake." At that time I
represented several attractions in New York, chief among the number
two musical comedies, entitled "The Royal Chef" and "Piff, Paff,
Pouf." I wired Judge Parker's secretary that the choruses of these
productions had formed a club, which was to be known as The Theatrical
Women's Parker Association, and the purpose of which was to induce
male performers to go home to vote. Would Judge Parker receive a
delegation from this society? The wire was signed "Nena Blake," and,
in due time, Miss Blake received a courteous and conclusive reply.
Judge Parker would not.

That message was a stunner. In the face of it, there was only one
thing to do--send along our delegation on the pretence that no answer
to our communication had ever been received. Nine chorus ladies were
picked out in a hurry, placed in charge of a shrewd newspaper woman
who passed as another show girl, and the whole outfit was dispatched
to Aesopus. The newspaper woman had instructions to register at a
prominent hotel as a delegation from the Theatrical Women's Parker
Association, and to parade herself and her charges before all the
alert correspondents in the little town on the Hudson. That done, we
who had stayed behind got ready photographs of the pilgrims and
waited.

The wait was not long. By nine o'clock that night the bait had been
swallowed at Aesopus, and my office was crowded with reporters anxious
to verify the story wired from up the river. Judge Parker, with
characteristic kindness, had lunched the party, allowed it to sing to
him, and sent it away rejoicing. Most of the boys "smelled a mouse,"
but the thing was undeniably true and much too important to be
ignored. The Theatrical Women's Parker Club, "Piff, Paff, Pouf" and
"The Royal Chef" were well advertised the next morning.

It was the failure of a prominent newspaper to mention either of our
plays by name that drove me to further utilization of this scheme.
Such an omission is always unfair and unjust. A story is good enough
to be printed or it is not; if not, nobody has cause for complaint, if
it is, there is no reason why a newspaper should deny the expected
compensation. Resolving that I would compel this payment, I
immediately arranged for a public meeting of the Theatrical Women's
Parker Club. The Democratic National Committee furnished us with a
cart-load of campaign literature and with three speakers, one of whom
was Senator Charles A. Towne. The other orators we provided. They were
Eddie Foy, Dave Lewis, Nena Blake, Grace Cameron and Amelia Stone. The
juxtaposition, I felt confident, was sufficiently grotesque to
provoke comment.

[Illustration: "_A public meeting of The Theatrical Women's Parker
Club_"]

I wrote nine political speeches for the occasion, held two rehearsals,
and, when our advertisements failed to draw an audience, secured a
fine one by sending to such congregating places as the Actors'
Society. The affair passed off beautifully, Senator Towne adapting
himself to circumstances and making one of the most graceful and
agreeable addresses imaginable. I heard it from a nook in the fly
gallery, where I remained until the meeting was adjourned. This "fake"
accomplished its purpose, the delinquent newspaper falling in line
with the others in publishing the story.

It would tax your patience and your faith in the existence of modesty
were I to go into detail regarding a score of similar "fakes" which
come to mind. How this same Nena Blake was kidnapped from the Garrick
Theater, Chicago, and sent to New York in the costume she wore in "The
Royal Chef"; how her sister, Bertha, was sent to Zion to kiss the
unkissed son of John Alexander Dowie; how a supposed German baron
threw across the footlights to Julia Sanderson a bouquet from which
dropped an $18,000 diamond necklace; how a chorus girl named Thorne
created a sensation at a Physical Culture Show in Madison Square
Garden by declaring the costume she was expected to wear "shockingly
immodest"; how a niece of Adele Ritchie changed her name to Adele
Ritchie Jr., and Miss Ritchie herself was sought in marriage by a
Siamese millionaire--all of these anecdotes must pass with the mere
mention that they were successful "fakes."

The manner in which a good story may go wrong merits more extended
description. While an extravaganza, yclept "The Babes and the Baron",
was in town, I resolved upon a news event so complicated that I wonder
now at my temerity in undertaking it. The idea was that some well
known doctor should find on his doorstep one morning a young and
pretty girl, fashionably dressed and intelligent-looking, but quite
unable to recall her name or to give an account of herself. The
doctor, naturally enough, would report the affair to the police, who,
in turn, would give it to the reporters. These gentlemen, deceived by
the fact that no possible advertising could be suspected in the case
of a woman who looked untheatrical and who did not even know her own
name, were expected to give untold space in the evening papers to the
mystery. After the journals in question had been published, the girl
was to be identified, so that her name and that of "The Babes and the
Baron" might be printed in the morning.

It was necessary that, at this time, the victim should be able to give
a good reason for her condition. The reason selected was as follows:
During the performance of the extravaganza, some question had arisen
as to the young woman's courage or cowardice. To prove the former, she
had volunteered to hide in the Eden Musee and to remain all night in
the "chamber of horrors." The terrible sights of this place had
frightened her into hysteria; the porter, hearing her scream and
believing her to be intoxicated, had ejected her; a kindly old
gentleman had found her in the street and started to drive her to a
hospital, when, becoming alarmed, he had decided instead to place her
on the doorstep of a physician's house, ring the bell, and get away.

Anyone will tell you that the first essential to having roast goose
for dinner is to get your goose. At least twenty chorus girls must
have been interrogated before I found one willing and competent to try
the experiment. Mabel Wilbur, afterward prima donna of "The Merry
Widow", was chosen, and she spent eleven days being instructed in the
symptoms of the mental disease known as asphasia. The officials of the
Eden Musee, glad to share the advertising, carefully coached the
porter in the story he was to tell. The stage manager of "The Babes
and the Baron" was admitted into the secret and a bright journalist
was engaged to hover about and superintend affairs. Of course, my
appearance in the neighborhood of the sickroom would have been fatal
to the "fake."

Miss Wilbur was left on the doctor's doorstep shortly after four
o'clock one mild morning. From that time until night the scheme worked
like a charm. Miss Wilbur, bravely enduring all sorts of physical and
mental tests, passed the scrutiny of a dozen detectives and medical
men. After vainly buying a dozen editions of the evening papers in an
anxious effort to learn how matters were progressing, I suddenly found
the journals filled with the affair. "The Mystery of a Hansom
Cab--Pretty Girl Left on Doctor's Doorstep in Dying Condition" and
"Police Have New Problem" were headlines that flared across front
pages. Up to that point the story had been a huge success. There
remained only the matter of identification to connect with the other
story, like two ends of a tunnel meeting, and this promised to be a
delicate matter. Say "chorus girl" to a newspaper man and he
immediately becomes suspicious. Our hardest work was before us.

At nine o'clock the stage manager of "The Babes and the Baron" was
sent around to recognize Miss Wilbur. It was he who had challenged her
courage, and, alarmed at her failure to report for the performance, he
had hastened to pick up the clue given him by the evening papers. Miss
Wilbur's identity was established in the presence of a score of
reporters and photographers, none of whom seemed to suspect anything.
"At the hour of going to press" we all felt certain that we had
"pulled off" the biggest theatrical "fake" known to history.

Every paper in town had the story the next morning--but it was the
true story. A City News Association man had recognized my bright
journalist, at that time passing himself off as a brother of Miss
Wilbur, and the net result of our fortnight's toiling and moiling was
some six columns of ridicule.

These confessions would be incomplete if I did not admit here and now
that this story was the most ill-advised of my career. It brought
discomfit and discredit to a dozen persons, it involved an attempt to
deceive some of my best friends, and it put me in a bad light at the
very time that the approaching premiere of a play from my pen made
that most undesirable. A great many city editors have never forgiven
me my part in this particular "fake," although the owner of an evening
paper wrote me the next day: "I was fooled from first to last. You're
a wonder. Congratulations."

Another bad mistake was my story regarding the willingness of the
management to pay $50 a week for exceptionally beautiful chorus girls
to appear in "Mexicana." The story was printed all over the world, but
it caused critics to stamp as ugly one of the most attractive
ensembles ever brought to New York. "If any of these girls," said _The
Sun_, "gets $50 a week her employers are entitled to a rebate." I
cannot place in the same catalogue Madame Bernhardt's appeal to the
French Ambassador at Washington to protest against her exclusion from
playhouses controlled by the so-called Theatrical Syndicate. Madame
denied this over her own signature, but, from a press agent's point
of view, it was an exceedingly creditable falsehood.

It is possible to discuss at endless length the real value of the
"fake" and its place in theatrical advertising. Perhaps no one ever
went to a theater merely because one of the performers at that theater
was supposed to have bathed in milk or to have stopped a runaway
horse. On the other hand, I am sure that no one ever went to a theater
because he or she had seen the name of the play acted there posted
conspicuously on a bill-board. The mission of the bill-board is to
call attention to the fact that there is such-and-such an
entertainment and that it may be seen at such-and-such a house. There
is no question in my mind but that this much is done for a production
by "fake" stories concerning it. In rare instances, where the story
accentuates the importance of the presentation and its success, or
awakens interest in some member of the presenting company, the service
performed may be even greater. At all events, the average manager
expects this kind of advertising from the publicity promoter to whom
he pays a salary, and, naturally, the publicity promotor feels that it
is "his not to reason why." The press agent realizes that to any
failure on his part will always be attributed the misfortunes of the
management with which he is connected. Productions do a good business
because they are good productions, and a bad business because they
have bad press agents.

Every theatrical newspaper man knows the anecdote of the German
cornetist _en tour_ with a minstrel company. The organization was
toiling up a steep hill that lay between the railway station and the
town. The cornetist was warm and he was tired. "The camel's back"
broke when at last he stubbed his toe against a stone. Picking up the
obstruction, he threw it as far away as he could. "Ach!" he exclaimed.
"Ve got a fine advance agent!"




_THE WRITING AND READING OF PLAYS_

     Being a discussion as to which pursuit is the more painful,
     with various entertaining and instructive remarks as to the
     method of following both.


At my side lies an advertisement reading: "I will teach you to write
plays for $10!"

If the professor means that he can teach you to write plays that will
bring you ten dollars, he may be speaking the truth. If he means that
for ten dollars, or a hundred dollars, or a hundred thousand, he can
teach you to write plays, he is a liar!

Aunt Emma, who represents the palmy days of the stage, and "used to be
with Booth and Barrett", once gave me her opinion of schools of
acting. "One can learn to fence", she said, "and to walk and
articulate properly. But one cannot learn to think or to feel, and
without thinking and feeling there is no acting." Precisely the same
thing may be said of playwriting.

Of course, there is a great deal that the dramatist must know about
drama. W. T. Price's interesting volume on the subject contains about
a hundred iron-clad principles that should be read, and re-read, and
then forgotten. Such of the number as cling to your subconsciousness
can't do you any harm, and probably will do you a lot of good. The
others might help to make you a capable mechanic. Rostand's rooster,
once he had been told how to crow, couldn't crow--fell to the ground,
as it were, between two schools. Bronson Howard, asked to compile a
book of rules for playwriting, declined on the ground that he feared
being tempted to follow them.

To learn to do anything--do it! If you would know how to write plays
write them, read them, go to see them. Then think a while, and write
some more. If you feel sure you have a big idea--and sometimes it
seems to me that the big ideas come most often to people who can't
use them--pool it with the skill of someone who is willing to give
craftsmanship for inventive genius--and watch him. Avery Hopwood
collaborated on "Clothes" before he went single-handed at "Nobody's
Widow", and, midway, he leased his experience to the novelist who
furnished the plot of "Seven Days." Harriet Ford helped Joseph Medill
Patterson write "The Fourth Estate", and now Mr. Patterson is
exhibiting signs by which one may predict that he will do something
alone. Wilson Mizner worked with George Bronson Howard on "The Only
Law", and with Paul Armstrong on "The Deep Purple", and we may expect
soon a piece that will bear only the name of Wilson Mizner.

"What a lucky fellow!" we say occasionally of some new author who
springs into notice. "His first play, and a huge success!" But every
professional reader in town could tell you that this success _wasn't_
"his first play." While I was reading for the firm of Sam S. & Lee
Shubert, I saw three or four manuscripts from the pens of Rachel
Crothers and Thompson Buchanan. "The Three of Us" did not surprise me,
nor "A Woman's Way." I knew, and every man in my profession knew, that
Miss Crothers and Mr. Buchanan had spent years turning out pieces they
could not sell. They worked, and they studied, and they went to the
theater thoughtfully until they could write pieces that would sell.

Poets may be born or made, according to the field they occupy, but
playwrights must be born _and_ made. However, there isn't the least
use of dwelling on this fact. To the end of time men and women who
wouldn't think of trying to fashion a horseshoe without first having
served an apprenticeship with some blacksmith will go on endeavoring
to create comedies and tragedies without having made the least effort
to shape their talents--even to whet their instincts.

Once upon a time, in a speech delivered somewhere, I said that,
everything else being equal, the author who had never produced a play
had the best chance of producing a good one. I was wrong. It is true
that the newcomer is likely to have fresher ideas than the old stager,
and that generally he dramatizes a lifetime of experience, instead of
dramatizing only what he has gleaned between contracts. That accounts
for the fact that some tyros never repeat their primal successes. But,
even in this period of the novice, when appreciation of novelty
submerges appreciation of skill, statistics prove that a majority of
the pronounced hits are the work of established authors.

We believe the contrary, as we believe that most marriages turn out
badly, because beginners at authorship and enders of matrimony attract
attention. Much was said of the novices who won laurels last season,
and yet every single piece that ran a hundred nights or so on Broadway
was by an Avery Hopwood, a Winchell Smith, or a David Belasco. Any
number of brilliant young men flashed into view, and probably will
remain in view, but, as yet, of necessity, they are conspicuous for
promise rather than for fulfillment. The greatest originality, the
most synthetic ingenuity, and the sharpest wit were displayed by H. S.
Sheldon, in "The Havoc"; by Philip H. Bartholomae, in "Over Night"; by
Anne Caldwell, in "The Nest Egg"; by Tom Barry, in "The Upstart"; by
Al Thomas, in "Her Husband's Wife", and by George Bronson Howard and
Wilson Mizner in "The Only Law."

The danger faced by new men is that they may be snuffed out by their
first failures. Such an ungenerous reception as was given "The
Upstart", for example, might well discourage an author to the utter
ruin of his career. Managers, too, are likely to judge by the box
office rather than by the play--an exceedingly short sighted policy in
a "business" whose future depends upon the proper nursing of its
infants. The fluttering fledgling of today is the eagle of tomorrow.
Porter Emerson Browne, Jules Eckert Goodman, Edward Sheldon, Thompson
Buchanan, Avery Hopwood, James Forbes, the debutants of yester-year,
are the leading dramatists of this.

Naturally, everybody is trying to duplicate their experience.
Everybody writes plays. Some time ago an ambitious individual walked
into my office and announced that he had come from Rochester to submit
a tragedy in blank verse. I suggested that he need not have gone to so
much trouble and expense. "It wasn't any trouble or expense", he
replied. "I had to come anyway. I'm a conductor on the New York
Central."

Theodore Burt Sayre, who wrote "The Commanding Officer", and who is
the reader for Charles Frohman, told me not long ago that his most
persistent visitor was a policeman, who had composed a farce in six
acts. He also showed me a letter the author of which declared "I seen
menny plays that cost a doler and wasn't won-too-three with my play."
Every manager in New York has received a Brooklyn shoemaker who feels
certain he has produced a comic opera infinitely superior to the best
efforts of Gilbert and Sullivan. Of the would-be dramatists in the
learned professions, I should say that physicians are rarest as
playwrights, that journalists provide the best material, and that
clergymen produce the most and the worst.

With so many Cinderellas attempting to crowd their feet into the shoes
of Pinero and Jones, there can be no limit to the number of
manuscripts submitted each week to well known producers. The general
idea, I believe, is that managers are quite buried beneath piles of
plays. This is not absolutely true. Such an office as that of Henry B.
Harris, in the Hudson Theater, or of The Liebler Company, in Fifth
Avenue, may be the destination of from six to ten manuscripts a week.
About a third of this number come from agents, and these are likely to
receive quickest consideration, since the reader knows that, if they
were utterly without promise, they would not have been sent him. The
crop of flat and cylindrical packages fluctuates with altered
conditions. The manager who makes money out of the work of an unknown
author is sure to receive far more than his share of contributions
during the next year or two. William A. Brady got a thousand plays a
month from obscure aspirants immediately after the production of "'Way
Down East."

It is a fallacy widely current among new writers that their "copy" is
returned unread. One of the first theatrical stories I ever heard
concerned a woman who put sand between the pages of her rolled
manuscript and found it there still when the piece came back to her.
Nowadays, when the demand for material so far exceeds the supply as to
have become almost frantic, it is true not only that every play is
looked into, but that almost every play is looked into by every
manager. Round and round the circle they go, being judged from a
hundred viewpoints by a hundred men who know that a lucky strike means
a fortune, and who are eager in proportion. It is my firm belief that
all the good plays, not to speak of a fair number of bad ones, have
been or are about to be produced. Any piece that is not utterly,
hopelessly valueless is sure to find some appreciator in the end.
There are instances of manuscripts that, like "My Friend From India",
travel up and down Broadway for years, only to be accepted and staged
at last.

I have said that the dramatist who "arrives" generally has announced
himself first through various rolled and typewritten visiting cards.
The parcel that comes from Findlay, Ohio, or Omaha, Nebraska, bearing
the address of some one of whom the reader never heard before, is
pretty certain to be without promise. Usually, the manuscript betrays
itself in its first ten pages, and what follows rarely contains an
idea that might have been valuable even if its owner had learned his
trade. When the manager does discover a story worth while, or the
suggestion of a story, usually he is quick to put its originator in
touch with a literary manicure.

Charles Frohman, who frequently is styled "The Napoleon of the Drama",
takes no such Napoleonic chances. If you will look over one of Mr.
Frohman's budgets you will find that two-thirds of the plays he
announces have been presented abroad, and that the other third are
from the pens of such celebrities as Augustus Thomas. Naturally, this
is the safe, sane, and more-or-less sure method, and yet, even when
judged from a purely commercial view-point, it has its disadvantages.
If the system does not entail such losses as other managers suffer,
neither does it render possible such gains. Mr. Frohman paid George
Ade royalties for "Just Out of College", which was a failure, far in
excess of those granted by Henry W. Savage for "The County Chairman."
Popular dramatists turn out pretty poor stuff at times, as Mr. Frohman
was reminded when he produced William Gillette's "Electricity", and
excellent material may come from an unexpected source, as Wagenhals &
Kemper discovered when they purchased "Paid in Full" from a man whose
only previous work had been the unlucky "Sergeant James." As to the
invariable wisdom of offering here plays that were hits in Paris and
London, I can say only that sometimes we in America differ with our
cousins in France and England. We differed widely in the cases of
"The Speckled Band", "The Scarlet Pimpernel", and "The Foolish
Virgin." It would appear to be a much safer expedient to turn over
doubtful pieces to stock companies in one provincial city or another
and then to abide by the result. This expedient, by the way, has the
advantage of being inexpensive.

It is very difficult to identify a good play. When I was sixteen years
old, and didn't know whether manuscripts were an inch thick or a mile,
I felt quite sure that the manager who produced a bad play was a fool.
I used to say this frankly in the newspaper on which I was employed,
just as a lot of other cock-sure young men have been doing ever since.
Latterly, however, I have observed that a great many experienced
producers average about three failures to every one success, and I
leave the superior attitude to the literatti whose cleverness is
valued by their employers at from fifteen to fifty dollars a week. The
late A. M. Palmer, after a long life-time of experience, said to me:
"There does not live a man who can tell a good play from a bad one by
reading it. If there _were_ such a Solomon he would be worth half a
million dollars per annum to any manager in New York. Personally, I
have refused so many money-makers and accepted so many money-losers
that I select material now-a-days by guess work. I tossed a coin once
to decide whether or not I should buy what afterward proved to be one
of the biggest hits of my career."

I have said that it is difficult to identify a good play; it should
not be difficult to pass upon a bad one. Some of the things that reach
our stage are so very bad that nothing in the foregoing paragraph
excuses or explains their production. Several years ago there was
referred to me a romantic drama, written by a visiting Englishman. I
advised against it, but my employers were determined in its favor, and
the piece was presented soon afterward at the Princess Theater.

On the opening night, just after the second act, Louis De Foe,
dramatic critic of The World, came to me, and said: "I got here
late, and so lost the thread of the story. Can you tell me what the
play is about?"

[Illustration: "_It is very difficult to identify a good play_"]

I tried and failed.

One of my employers stood nearby. "Let's ask him?" I suggested. We
did--and _he_ didn't know. "Haven't you seen it?" inquired Mr. De Foe.

"Yes", quoth the manager, "and I've read it, and--and it has something
to do with love, but I--I forget the details." He suggested that we
wait until after the performance and speak to the author.

That gentleman told us that the story concerned a soldier of fortune,
who was about to do something or other--I don't remember what--when he
received a letter that altered his intentions.

"So I observed", said Mr. De Foe. "But why should it have altered
them? What was in the letter?"

The author looked at him blankly. "By Jove!" he explained. "I don't
know. I never thought of _that_!"

The next day he drafted a letter that would explain matters and asked
me to have it printed in the program. But, as the piece was to close
the following night, it didn't seem worth while.

Of course, no play as bad as this should ever find its way to the
footlights, and yet I am obliged to confess that a great many do. In
fact, fifteen years of observation have forced me to the conclusion
that the finer the texture of a play, the more unusual its theme, the
smaller the author's chance of finding a manager for it. Also, one
must admit, the smaller that manager's chance of finding a public.
Though they are not so numerous as one would like to see them, we have
producers of keen artistic sensibilities; some of them, like Charles
Frohman, George Tyler, Henry B. Harris, David Belasco, Henry Miller
and Wagenhals & Kemper, men who are not averse to losing money on a
worthy enterprise or, at least, to taking a long chance of making it.
For these men we should be grateful, and, though the New Theater has
brought out nothing remarkable from an untried pen, we should be
grateful, too, for an institution whose purpose is producing the best,
whether the best is profitable or not.

So many mental qualities are essential to the correct appraisal of a
play. For one thing, the manager must see not only what it is but what
it may become. Often the hardest work in playwriting has to be done
after the play has been produced. Pieces that seemed hopeless when
they were acted initially have been turned into huge successes. Scenes
are switched about, lines changed, often whole acts reconstructed. I
know a woman who was compelled to cut her play in half after it was
produced. Ordinarily one minute is required to act each page of
typewritten manuscript, but this work, which contained only one
hundred and fifty pages, ran nearly five hours. Difficult as such
condensation must have been, the task that confronted the author in
question was not to be compared with that of lengthening a play. It is
not advisable for embryonic dramatists to cut too closely according
to pattern. To tone down a strong play or shorten a long one is easy;
to build up a weak play or successfully pad out a short one is
impossible.

Most of the manuscripts that come to the desk of the reader do not
prompt sufficient doubt for any manager to be willing to try them. A
great many would seem to be the product of lunatics. Not long ago I
had a dramatization of a Russian novel that contained eleven acts and
twenty-one scenes. The adapter simply had melted down the whole six
hundred pages of fiction and was trying to pour it onto the stage.
Another offering, called "The Dogs of Infidelity", proved to be an
argument against atheism in five acts and seven scenes. The scoundrel
of this masterpiece was Robert G. Ingersol, and the play was
accompanied by a cartoon showing the agnostic fleeing from two police
officers, marked "Logic" and "Sarcasm", who were pursuing him at the
bidding of Justice, in the person of the author. Beneath this picture
were typewritten the favorable opinions of a number of people who
claimed to have read the piece. Standing in the center of the stage,
the villain of a melodrama still in my possession is supposed to
commit suicide by exploding a dynamite cartridge in his mouth. Beneath
the directions for this bit of business, the author has written: "The
performance concludes here." I should think it might!

[Illustration: "_A woman who was compelled to cut her play in half_"]

Of course, it is not often that one gets plays as absurd as these. If
it were, the reading of manuscripts would not be so dull and profitless
a task. The ordinary play is notable only for its crudity, its
artificiality, its lack of color, and its hopeless failure to rise
above the conventional and the commonplace. Dramatists follow each
other like sheep, and the smaller the dramatist happens to be the more
closely he follows. Thus it is that whenever somebody produces a piece
with a situation that creates comment, every second manuscript one
reads from that time on contains exactly the same situation. A long
while ago I grew so much interested in the likeness between plot and
plot that I catalogued two hundred plays according to their general
character. The result was as follows:

    Dramas in which woman goes to man's
             rooms at midnight                      37

      "    in which woman betrays man and
             then saves him                         19

      "    in which wronged woman gives evidence
             at end of play                          6

      "    in which man unwittingly falls in
             love with woman meant for him           9

      "    in which woman unwittingly falls
             in love with man meant for her          3

      "    in which wealth is unexpectedly
             derived from a mine or a patent        22

      "    built on the question of "love or
             duty"                                  24

      "    built on the question of the fitness
             of a reformed man or woman
             to marry                               16

      "    in which man or woman reforms
             the person he or she loves              3

    Comedies in which husband or wife ends
             the philandering of wife or husband
             by seeming to condone it               20

    Farces based on mistaken identity               31

      "    built around the necessity of a man
             lying to his wife                      28

The total of the table is not two hundred, because several of these
plays had none of the features mentioned, while others had more than
one.

Of course, it is well-nigh impossible for any dramatist, no matter how
well-meaning, to devise unparalleled characters, situations and
stories. Just as the fact that there are only so many notes in the
scale has been urged as an excuse for composers whose music is
reminiscent, so I would insist that there are only so many strings in
the heart. There is a limit to the number of situations that can be
brought about in real life, and, of course, there is a much more
definite limit to the number of these situations which have dramatic
value. In certain elemental facts all plays must be alike. For
example, it is inevitable that a large number of plays shall have
what is known as the "dramatic triangle"--which means the conflict of
two men and a woman or of two women and a man. It is inevitable that a
great majority of plays shall deal with that one great elemental
emotion--love. Once, when I was very young indeed, I experimented in
writing a comedy in which nobody was in love. The piece was presented
in Washington, and, to the best of my recollection, it lasted two
consecutive nights. This convinced me that there might be a line
beyond which one could not go in the effort to be unique.

There are a great number of things, however, that are so hackneyed and
conventional that it is no longer possible for an author to attempt
them. I do not think any manager would buy another play in which the
crucial situation was the concealment of the heroine in the apartments
of the hero or the villain. From time immemorial this has been the
stock episode for the third act climax in a four act play, and
audiences have begun to expect it as they expect supper after the
fourth act. Personally, I am free to confess that I should not be
likely to recommend the purchase of any drama in which the conclusion
of the third act did not bring a surprise calculated to make an
audience sit up and take notice. No author of today would dare begin
his work with a conversation between a maid and a butler. Neither
would he care to conceal one of his characters behind a screen or to
conclude his play with the finding of a bundle of papers. The
cigarette is still the hero of the society drama, and it is still true
on the stage that the happy conclusion of the love affair between the
juvenile and the ingenue usually is coincident with the conclusion of
the love affair between the leading man and the leading woman. We
begin to have heroes who are not too angelically good, however, and
villains who have motives more human than the mere desire to be
beastly and draw a hundred and fifty dollars a week for it. Very
slowly and gradually the perfect woman, the high-hatted knave, the
wronged girl, the comic Irishman, the naval lieutenant of comic
opera, the English butler and their associates are passing from our
midst. Peace to their ashes!

Plays have their epochs, just as books do, and there are fashions in
the drama as pronounced as those in dress. Always one successful work
of a particular class brings about a host of imitations, and, for a
time, it seems as though the public would never tire of that
particular kind of entertainment. "The Prisoner of Zenda" was
responsible for a hundred romances laid in mythical kingdoms; "Lady
Windimere's Fan" brought drawing room comedy into vogue; "'Way Down
East" bred a perfect epidemic of pastorals; "Sherlock Holmes" created
a demand for plays concerning criminals. All of these varieties of
entertainment, save possibly the last, have been laid on the shelf,
and we now are going in vigorously for frothy farce and comic opera in
long skirts. The manner in which one author follows the lead of
another, as demonstrated above, extends beyond the selection of such
important things as stories, and reaches even to titles. Ten years
ago we couldn't have a name without the word "of" in it. On the
bill-boards were advertised "The Whitewashing of Julia", "The
Manoeuvres of Jane", "The Superstitions of Sue", "The Stubbornness of
Geraldine" and a score of others. Then somebody christened a charming
sketch "Hop-o'-My-Thumb", and for a while it seemed that we could get
nothing but hyphenated titles, such as "Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire" and
"All-of-a-Sudden-Peggy." Now-a-days the vogue seems to be the
combination of an article and a noun--"The Boss", "The Nigger", "The
Gamblers" and "The Concert."

Please do not understand that, in calling attention to these
similarities, I intend to accuse anyone of plagiarism. Deliberate
theft of ideas from contemporary offerings is likely to result in
law-suits, and I don't believe that there are left in the printed
dramas any ideas worth stealing. I used to hear an interesting story
of Paul Potter's writing original plays in the Boston Public Library,
but it seemed to me that much of his work was too good to have been
filched from the old fellows whose publishers bound their vulgarity,
their leaden dialogue and their uningenious situations in yellow
covers. It is very difficult, as I have said, to squeeze new
situations out of a dull world, from the manners and morals of which
about four hundred dramas have been pressed every year during the past
half century. It is especially hard to devise original material in
America, where prudish restrictions hedge us about and anything deep
and vital in life immediately is set down as immoral. American authors
cannot wring novel incidents from the emotions; they must profit by
such circumstances as the invention of wireless telegraphy and the
automobile. The telephone and the motor car are speedily becoming
bulwarks of the drama in the United States!

The possibility of giving subtle and original treatment to familiar
phases of life, together with the attendant possibility of revealing
human nature in the theater, hold forth the chief promise along this
line. Clever twisting and turning will make a new incident from an
old one, as is best demonstrated in what Beaumont and Fletcher did
with Lope de Vega when they adapted "Sancho Ortez" into "The Custom of
the Country", and playwrights are learning to turn little things to
vital account in the construction of their plays. A glance at a
photograph now-a-days is made to convey all what was indicated in a
five-minutes talk between butler and maid twenty years ago.

As to the matter of heart interest, that, after all, is the thing that
counts most, and that is eternal and inexhaustible. Charles Klein,
author of "The Music Master", put this to me neatly not long ago in an
attempt to prove the advantage of the realistic drama over the
romantic. "Supposing a man comes to you", he remarked, "and says that
his wife has just fallen out of a balloon. You're not sorry, because
you can't understand why his wife should have gone up in a balloon.
Let the same man say to you, however, that he is out of a position and
that his family is starving, and see how quickly the tears will come
into your eyes. So far as modern audiences are concerned, the old
duel-fighting, hose-wearing romantic heroes are up in a balloon. We
want sorrows and joys we can comprehend."

It is this creed that makes the new dramatist an entity worth seeking.
If it proves difficult to discover him among the thousands who write
plays, it at least is worth while to cultivate him when he is found
among those who write promising plays. "By their works ye shall know
them" is particularly applicable to the men who will some day succeed
Barrie and Pinero. They will bear watching. If I were a producing
manager I should keep in touch with the men whose first pieces
indicate the possession of ability. I would set them at work, not at
tailoring plays to fit personalities, but at realizing their ideas and
their ideals. Certainly this great country is full of material waiting
for dramatization, and it must be equally true that it is full of
authors capable of accomplishing the task. They will not be the
illiterate glory-hunters who deluge theatrical offices with their
manuscripts, nor will they be the celebrities whose brains have been
pressed dry. It were wise to look for them among the people whose
professions draw them into close touch with the real world and the
theater; among the newspaper men and the enthusiastic play-lovers;
among those whose first and second efforts are now the financial
failures on Broadway.




_THE PERSONALITIES OF OUR PLAYWRIGHTS_

     Being an effort to out do Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.
     D. Roberts at their own game--which is speaking literally.


Not long ago an intelligent young man walked into a meeting of the
Society of American Dramatists and Composers, at the Hotel Astor, and,
after scanning the faces about him, inquired: "Is this the Cloak and
Suit Manufacturers' Association?"

Don't blame the young man. If tomorrow you undertook on a wager to
tell a prosperous tailor from a celebrated author, your safest plan
would be to select the individual who looked more like a tailor, and
say: "That is the author!" Among persons whose acquaintances do not
figure in the public prints, except as "Old Subscriber" or "Vox
Populi", the playwright is still supposed to be distinguishable by
long, curly hair, a flowing tie, a high hat, and a frock coat, worn
with the right hand inserted in the space between the first and second
buttons.

As a matter of fact, this description fits only the quack doctor and
the vender of patent medicines. There _are_ flowing-tie playwrights,
but generally they belong in the ranks of the ineffectual and the
unproduced. One sees them oftener at studio teas than at "first
nights." In whatever other respects they may differ, our dramatists
are pretty much alike as regards the commonplaceness of their manner
and appearance. Most of them regard the writing of plays as a
business, and go about it as a baker goes about making his loaves or a
plumber about mending a pipe.

On the whole, it is easy to understand the disappointment of a
hero-worshipper to whom a companion pointed out Charles Klein. The
author of a dozen successful pieces tells the story with great gusto.
"It was on a ferry boat," he relates, "and two young chaps were
standing near the forward doors. As I strolled past, one of them
remarked: 'That's the fellow that wrote "The Gamblers."'"

"My chest had already begun to expand when I caught the rejoinder.
'Him!' exclaimed the other. 'Well, I'll be damned!'"

Augustus Thomas and David Belasco are two dramatists who would rob no
layman of his illusions. Mr. Belasco, whose clerical collar and
spiritual face have been pictured in numberless newspapers and
magazines, looks every inch a poet, and his soft voice and far-away
manner help sustain the impression. Mr. Thomas more evidently belongs
to our own mundane sphere; he is a man of the world, distinguished by
his poise and polish, by the suavity, reserve and equilibrium that
come with confidence and after long experience. The late Clyde Fitch
had these qualities, too. He was an artist to his finger tips, a
thinker of fine thoughts and a dreamer of great dreams. This article
originally began with an account of him, and, since Clyde Fitch was
much more than a transient figure in our theater, I see no reason why
he should be left out of it now.

"Mr. Fitch", I wrote the day he sailed for France, never to return,
"is the son of a former army officer, forty-four years old, graduated
from Amherst College, and has spent much of his life traveling about
Europe. He is quite tall, rather thickly built, and has a heavy, dark
mustache. My acquaintance with him dates from the performance of my
first original comedy, 'The Little Gray Lady', and is due to a
friendly feeling for the new-comers in his profession that is one of
his finest traits.

"'The Little Gray Lady' was being presented in the Garrick Theater,
and I was somewhat excited, the morning after its premiere, at
learning that a box had been secured for Mr. Fitch. That night I
stationed myself across the auditorium, so that I might judge how he
enjoyed the entertainment. My heart almost stopped beating when, soon
after the curtain lifted, the object of my interest arose from his
seat, and manifested every intention of departing. 'Good heaven!' I
exclaimed to myself. 'Is the piece as contemptible as that? And, even
if it is, what an affront; what a rude thing to do!' My mortification
was short-lived. Mr. Fitch and his party did walk out of their box,
but only to take orchestra chairs, from which they had a better view
of the stage. The next morning I received a generous letter. '"The
Little Gray Lady" is a big "Little Lady", I think.' And would I lunch
tomorrow at Mr. Fitch's town house, in East Fortieth Street?

"This house has afforded a wide-open outlet for its owner's
constitutional lavishness, and is, perhaps, as luxuriously appointed
and as exquisitely fitted as any residence of its size in New York.
Mr. Fitch loves beautiful things, and invests in them with a
prodigality that would frighten the heirs of a copper king. 'It
doesn't matter how much money I make,' he said to me one afternoon. 'I
spend a big income as quickly as a little one.' The Fortieth Street
domicile is literally crowded with paintings, carvings, ceramics, and
other objects of art. A gentleman who dined there recently had his
attention attracted by three curiously wrought cigarette cases that
stood on the table, one at each plate. He supposed them to be beaten
brass, set with rhine stones, and was amazed when his wife discovered
that they were of solid gold and diamonds. 'Their intrinsic worth,' he
said, 'could not have been less than ten thousand dollars. Imagine my
horror when I remembered that I had been on the point of inquiring
whether they were meant to be dinner favors!'

"Mr. Fitch maintains two establishments beside the place in New York;
one at Greenwich, called Quiet Corners--a young woman I know insists
upon speaking of it as 'Cozy Corners'--and the other an estate of two
hundred acres at Katohna, in Westchester County. James Forbes, who
wrote 'The Chorus Lady' and 'The Travelling Salesman', relates an
experience of a visit to the former residence. Here he found a stable,
which, in lieu of horses, held hundreds of masterpieces in marble and
bronze which the collector had not been able to resist purchasing,
but for which he had no room in his house!

"Managers who make contracts with Clyde Fitch will tell you that he
appreciates the value of money, but that commodity certainly doesn't
cling long to his fingers. However, a responsible man can afford to be
irresponsible, and an industrious man to be extravagant. Mr. Fitch has
written fifty-four plays in less than twenty years, an average of one
play every four months! When you stop to consider that an ordinary
manuscript consists of about one hundred and thirty typed pages, and
that each piece must be thought out, drafted and re-drafted, rehearsed
and produced you will admit that the labor involved in making such a
record must have been Herculean.

"Nevertheless, Mr. Fitch never seems to be hurried or worried. He
entertains a good deal, goes to the theater frequently, and takes a
boyish interest in trifles. It is this interest that fills his work
with human touches, the small topicalities of the moment. I saw him
one night at 'The Three Twins', and he commented laughingly upon
the catchiness of the song, 'Cuddle Just a Little Closer.' Two months
later I found that air as the motif, almost the Wagnerian theme, of
his comedy, 'The Bachelor.'

[Illustration: "_Clyde Fitch's ability to work under any
circumstances_"]

"The secret of the Fitch productiveness undoubtedly lies in his
ability to work under any circumstances, in odd moments. Austin
Strong, author of 'The Toymaker of Nuremberg', and one or two other
guests were spending a rainy week-end in the living room at Katohna,
when their host excused himself, and, sitting at a desk the other side
of the room, began writing. 'Go on talking', he said; 'you don't
bother me.' He had plunged into the second act scene between Mabel
Barrison and Charles Dickson in 'The Blue Mouse', and he finished it
that afternoon. Mr. Forbes saw him one morning in Venice, gliding
about in a gondola and scribbling as fast as his pencil could cover
the pages. That exquisite bit of 'The Girl Who Has Everything', in
which Eleanor Robson punished little Donald Gallagher by compelling
him to strike her, was indited upon a pocket pad while the chauffeur
was repairing the playwright's car, which had broken down between
Greenwich and New York.

"Mr. Fitch abrogates to himself the task of producing his works,
taking personal charge of everything, from the selection of the
company to the designing of color schemes and the purchase of five and
ten cent articles of bric-a-brac. Most people have heard of his skill
at rehearsal. He and Mr. Thomas are two of the best stage managers in
America. Seated quietly in a corner of the auditorium, or standing
just back of the footlights, Mr. Fitch gives the directions that make
his performances perfect mosaics of marvelously life-like minutae. Of
stories bearing upon his quick perception, his instinct for detail,
and his understanding of cause and effect there are enough to make a
saga, but one anecdote will serve the purpose of this article.

"It was at the dress rehearsal of 'Girls', toward the end of the
first act, when the young women were climbing into their roosts and
saying 'good night.' A property man appeared with a radiator, which
the author had insisted upon having in the setting, 'because I never
saw a flat without one.' The stage hand set down his burden and was
about to tip toe into the wings, when he was stopped by a sharp
command. 'Wait!' exclaimed Mr. Fitch.

"The property man waited. 'Excuse me', he muttered. 'I didn't mean to
interrupt--'

'Never mind that!' the dramatist continued. 'Look here! Miss Maycliffe
says "Goodnight!" You wait two seconds and then hammer like blazes on
a piece of iron behind that radiator. I want the noise that steam
makes in the pipes--'

"'I'm on!' grinned the property man. So were the others. Everybody in
that house had been awakened in the dead of night by the malicious
clanking of the steam pipes, and everybody recognized the bit of
every-day. The audience the next night was not less quick of
perception, and the diversion proved, as you probably know, to be one
of the most effective bits of comedy in 'Girls.'"

All this was written two years ago. Quiet Corners and The Other House
are deserted now, and the beautiful things that filled them, and the
residence in Fortieth Street, have been distributed. A part of the
collection was willed to the Metropolitan Museum. It is pathetic to
reflect that the first Fitch play to win unqualified praise from the
critics was produced after the death of its author. Yet "The City" was
not a better piece than "The Climbers", or "Her Own Way", or "The Girl
With the Green Eyes", or "The Truth." Clyde Fitch was dead; therein
lay the difference. The living Clyde Fitch always was treated by the
journalistic reviewers as a sort of malefactor, as a man whose
deliberate intent was to do bad work. Only his intimates know how
keenly he felt this. "Newspaper praise," he said to me once, "is for
the dramatist on his way up or his way down; never for the dramatist
at the top." Clyde Fitch was the most brilliant man who ever wrote
for the stage in America. Heaven rest his soul!

Augustus Thomas conducts rehearsals from an orchestra stall in the
body of the theater, whence he shouts instructions through a
megaphone. I have often printed the story of the retort courteous
which he is said to have made to J. J. Shubert when that impressario
interrupted a rehearsal of "The Witching Hour", but, in this
connection, perhaps the tale will bear repetition.

According to my informant, the author of "Arizona" was intent upon a
serious scene when Mr. Shubert, who was financially interested in the
production, stopped the players, and, turning to Mr. Thomas, remarked:
"I think this would be a good place for some witty dialogue."

"Yes?" replied Mr. Thomas. "As for instance?"

He is a bold and a foolish man who throws himself upon the point of
the playwright's verbal poignard, for, among those who know him, Mr.
Thomas is as famous for his skill with speech as for his skill with
the pen. He smiles as he thrusts, but the results are none the less
sanguinary. "I thought Thomas was a man", Paul Armstrong is reported
to have said of him, "until I saw him take a handkerchief from his
sleeve. Men have hip pockets for their handkerchiefs."

"_I_ had," quoth Mr. Thomas, when he heard the remark, "until I began
to have my clothes made by a _good_ tailor!"

This ready wit makes the dramatist one of the best, if not the best
post prandial speaker in New York. Never a banquet at which he talks
but the street rings the next day with quips of his making. "The
trouble with amateur carvers", he said at the Friars' dinner to John
Drew, "is that the gravy so rarely matches the wall paper." On another
occasion he characterized a fatuous argument as being "like a chorus
girl's tights, which touch every point and cover nothing."

[Illustration: "_Augustus Thomas shouts instructions through a
megaphone_"]

Mr. Thomas finds time for many activities outside of his profession.
Everyone knows of his energetic work for the cause of William Jennings
Bryan. Throughout the three Bryan campaigns the dramatist made
speeches, organized political meetings, and otherwise labored beneath
the standard of the Commoner. Mr. Thomas' long suit is organizing.
Upon the death of Bronson Howard, he succeeded to the presidency of
the American Dramatists' Club, which he has metamorphosed into the
Society of American Dramatists and Composers. The parent body was deep
in the slough of despond, seeming to have no other purpose than
proving that genius really is an infinite capacity for taking food.
Mr. Thomas awakened the fraternal spirit, got committees to work on
suggestions for plan and scope, benevolently assimilated a club of
women playwrights, and created an association that is likely to be a
power, instead of being merely a pow-wow, in the land.

The greater part of the year, Mr. Thomas lives at New Rochelle, but
during the summer he goes frequently to his cottage, The Dingle, at
East Hampton. He is a man fifty years old, and of particularly
striking appearance. Tall, finely proportioned, smooth-shaven, with
resolute face and hair just beginning to turn white, he would be
observed in any gathering. As I have said, his manner is marked by
complete self-possession, and a good deal of self-satisfaction. To
this he certainly is entitled. A close friend of his believes that Mr.
Thomas dramatized himself when he created the part of the quiet,
masterful gambler, Jack Brookfield, in "The Witching Hour."

Charles Klein is of very small stature--a fact that probably accounts
for the anecdote related earlier in my article. None of his family has
been a sky-scraper. Manuel Klein, the composer, is not above five feet
six, and Alfred Klein, another brother, who originated the role of the
elephant tamer in "Wang", owed much of his success as a comedian to
his brevity--that being, as you know, the soul of wit. Charles is the
embodiment of dignity, and takes himself and his work most seriously.
I think I have never seen a photograph of him that did not show him in
his library, either writing or reading some ponderous tome. He has a
fine head, with a lofty brow that grows to be a little loftier every
year.

No estimate of Mr. Klein could be called complete which did not take
account of his grit and stick-to-it-iveness. Connected with the
theater from his earliest youth--he was call boy in the company with a
relative of mine--he produced his first play when he was hardly more
than twenty. His misses were many, and his hits few and far between,
but he kept on trying, until, with David Warfield's first starring
venture, "The Auctioneer", he struck the bullseye of public approval
squarely in the middle. Today he probably is the wealthiest of our
dramatists, and a couple of years ago it was estimated that his income
could not be less that $3,000 a week. He owns a charming home, called
Shirley Manor after the principal female character in "The Lion and
the Mouse", at Rowayton, Conn. In the same town he operates a hat
factory of which his son until recently was the manager.

In the adamantine quality of his "hard luck story", no one far
surpasses Eugene Walter, whose income used to hover about that quoted
as Mr. Klein's. It is told that this young man was lodging upon a park
bench when Wagenhals & Kemper produced his "Paid in Full", but,
personally, I am inclined to regard this tale as more picturesque than
accurate. In need of money he may have been, but the parental Walters,
who live in Cleveland, were quite able to prevent his lacking real
necessities, and 'Gene himself has always been in the way of earning a
living in the newspaper or the theatrical business. He served an
apprenticeship as press agent of various attractions, and it was while
both of us were acting in this capacity that we met at the Walnut
Street Theater, in Philadelphia.

Mr. Walter's initial effort, "Sergeant James", had just been
produced, and had scored an unquestionable failure. He told me the
story of the piece, and "it listened good", but I could not believe it
possible that the man opposite me was capable of winning a place in a
profession of letters. Eugene Walter is not impressive to the naked
eye. I had him in mind chiefly when I spoke of the ease with which one
might mistake a dramatist for a prosperous tailor. Mr. Walter looks
more like a neat and gentlemanly mechanic. He cannot be above thirty
years of age, and his height and weight--he is five feet five and tips
the scales in the neighborhood of a hundred and forty--make him seem
to be about twenty-four. My recollection of his dress is that he
usually wears a flannel shirt. I may be wrong as to this detail, but,
in any event, his style and general appearance are such as to create
the impression.

[Illustration: "_Eugene Walter was lodging upon a park bench when
Wagenhals & Kemper produced his 'Paid in Full'_"]

His demeanor suggests neither culture nor education, though, as I have
said, he comes of a good family and had excellent schooling. The value
of erudition, even so far as it concerns the technique of the drama,
in the writing of plays he denies absolutely. In fact, I believe that
his horror of being thought what he calls "a high brow" leads Mr.
Walter to assume a contempt of art and letters, though he has it not.
He has an intuitive appreciation of the beautiful, and yet, at a
recent exhibition of the paintings of a great Spaniard, his only
comment was, "Don't let's waste any more time in here!" "Playwrights
are _born_", he has gone on record as observing. "You can't _learn_
anything about playwriting."

If genius is the quality of doing by instinct, without great thought
or labor, obeying the commands of a _something_ outside of one's self,
Eugene Walter is certainly a genius. If it is, as some philosopher has
said, "an infinite capacity for taking pains", he is nothing of the
sort. He works by fits and starts, idling unconscionably for months at
a time, and then completing a play in a fortnight. "The Easiest Way"
was written in ten days. Mr. Walter's method of composition really is
nothing more nor less than improvisation--the method children employ
when they "make things up" as they "go along."

The tools necessary to the process are one large room, one outfit of
furniture, and one exceptionally rapid stenographer. Mr. Walter and
the stenographer enter the room. The door is locked, and work is begun
by placing the furniture as it is to be placed on the stage--in other
words, by setting the scene. Then the young dramatist begins to act.
He is all the characters in his play. He rushes about the apartment,
quarreling with himself, making love to himself, now standing here as
one person and then racing to the opposite end of the apartment to be
another. All the time he is speaking the words that come into his mind
as natural under the circumstances, and the stenographer is taking
them down at top speed. At the end of an hour or two an act is
finished, an invisible curtain is rung down, and, if the amanuensis
hasn't fainted, as two did in one day of labor on "Paid in Full", the
stage is set for the next act.

Of course, you understand that, before the play reaches this point,
the story, the situations, and even some details of dialogue must have
been carefully thought out. In connection with Mr. Walter, I _should_
say that they must have had time to assemble in his mind, having
popped in, like Topsy, already grown. He goes about with what he
himself described to me as "a seething mass of stuff in my head" until
the "seething mass" cries for release, and then--the impromptu
performance before the audience of one. The quickness of Mr. Walter's
conception, the instantaneousness with which drama is formed for him,
is illustrated by an experience of last winter.

We had been to witness a bad play--one doomed to close the following
Saturday. "Hopeless!" I said, as we left the theater.

"Hopeless", repeated Mr. Walter, "but not without possibilities. If
that idea had been mine, I should have commenced with the big
situation of the third act. Then I should have worked backward, using
the story of the--"

In five minutes he had sketched a new play, constructed around the
theme of the old one, and it was a corker!

As everyone knows, Eugene Walter was married recently to Charlotte
Walker, the actress, and it is common knowledge, too, that both were
bitterly disappointed at David Belasco's refusal to assign the
principal role in "The Easiest Way" to Miss Walker. For this
disappointment her husband tried to atone by fitting her with "Just a
Wife", but the piece failed sadly at the Belasco Theater. The Walters
live in the Ansonia Apartments, in upper Broadway, but they are
contemplating the erection of a home near Long Island Sound. The man
who writes plays, or, for that matter, any other man who performs
labor requiring close concentration, finds it impossible to do his
best in New York. "The very air is laden with distraction", says
George Broadhurst, author of "The Man of the Hour." "When I want to
work I get as far as possible from Forty-second street."

A dramatist of a pattern with Eugene Walter's, though drawn in bolder,
blacker lines, is Paul Armstrong, to whom theater-goers owe "Salomy
Jane", "The Heir to the Hoorah" and "Alias Jimmy Valentine". Mr.
Armstrong's contempt for the ordinary amenities, the graces of
every-day, is own big brother to Mr. Walter's. He is a big,
fine-looking fellow, characterized by tremendous vigor and virility,
by what he himself would call "the punch." He is aggressively
self-confident, where Augustus Thomas is only passively so; combative
by disposition and much inclined to talk in superlatives. His
broad-brimmed hat and his black imperial suggest the Westerner, though
most of his life has been spent in New York. He was formerly a
well-known authority on pugilism, writing for the _Evening Journal_
under the nom de plume of "Right Cross."

Mr. Armstrong's hatred of theatrical managers used to be a by-word,
but it has been less so since he himself undertook the production of
his own melo-drama, "Society and the Bulldog." His experience with one
impressario, A. H. Woods, to whom he sold "The Superstitions of Sue",
is as amusing a story as I know.

"The Superstitions of Sue" already had been accepted by the two senior
members of the firm of Sullivan, Harris & Woods, and Mr. Armstrong had
an appointment to read the piece to the junior member at eleven
o'clock one bright Sunday. Promptly at that hour, he appeared at the
Woods residence, in Riverside Drive, accompanied by two friends.
Introductions followed, and the friends sat down, with Mr. and Mrs.
Woods, to hear the new farce.

Mr. Armstrong had hardly begun when the visitors burst into a roar of
laughter. They howled afresh at every line, including descriptions of
characters and "business", and the rendering was concluded with the
pair rolling about in a perfect ecstacy of mirth. Mr. Woods regarded
them with sober suspicion. His risibles hadn't been touched, but, when
Mrs. Woods joined in the merriment, he determined that he didn't know
humor when he met it, and, the seance being over, closed a contract to
present "The Superstitions of Sue."

When the men had gone, Mr. Woods said to Mrs. Woods: "I suppose I'm
dull, but I thought that play duller still. Of course, Armstrong's
friends were _brought_ to laugh, but when you began laughing, too, I
knew the piece _must_ be funny."

"Why", responded Mrs. Woods, "I only laughed because the others did. I
wanted to be civil."

"The Superstitions of Sue" was one of the worst failures of its year.

I have spoken of Eugene Walter's method of work, but that method is
not more remarkable than the faith in a special environment held by
James Forbes. Even while he smiles at his own credulity, Mr. Forbes
believes firmly that he can put forth his best effort only in Room
371 of the Bellevue Hotel, in Boston. Whenever he "feels a play coming
on", he boards a train, journeys to The Hub, and locks himself up in
the apartment which bears that number. There he composed the scenarios
of "The Chorus Lady", "The Travelling Salesman," and "The Commuters."

"I can think more clearly on a railway train than anywhere else",
declares Mr. Forbes. "A chair car is the ideal place for
concentration." This young fellow differs from his colleagues in his
inability to work in the country. He owns and occupies a veritable
palace at Croton-on-Hudson, but he never attempts anything important
there. He says: "I find my surroundings too alluring. Only conscience
keeps me at a desk anyway, and conscience is weaker than the charm of
outdoors." One rather fancies that Jimmie's conscience--he is "Jimmie"
to his friends--is pretty rigid. He comes of Scotch ancestry, and was
reared in a Scotch Presbyterian community in Canada. "The theater was
held up to my youthful attention as a dreadful place", he told me one
night, when we were lingering over supper. "The stock story in my
family concerned a playhouse in Edinboro, which, being used
sacreligously for the representation of a scene in heaven, was
promptly burned, with every soul in it, as a divine judgment.

"This tale stuck fast in my memory. At the age of nine I stole away to
see 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', and, when the transformation showed Little
Eva in Paradise, I slipped out and waited in the street for the
theater to burn down. I was terribly disappointed that nothing of the
sort happened, and, after hanging around for the better part of the
afternoon, I went home a confirmed agnostic."

Jimmie drifted from Scotch Presbyterianism into dramatic authorship by
easy and natural stages. First he was employed in a wholesale grocery
store, then he became an actor, a newspaper man, a press agent, a
manager, and, finally, a playwright. A short story, which he had
published under the title of "The Extra Girl", suggested "The Chorus
Lady", and an acquaintance with Rose Stahl, who had been leading woman
of a company in which he had acted, lead to her being chosen for the
principal role in the one act play of that name. Mr. Forbes soon saw
the possibility of amplifying the sketch into a four act comedy, and,
though Miss Stahl was not enthusiastic about the idea at first, he
induced her to assume the part in which she has since appeared more
than a thousand times.

Mr. Forbes is a boyish-looking young man, small in stature, nervous in
manner, with a swarthy skin, and an ocean of forehead into which
descends a peninsula of glossy black hair. He is general manager for
Henry B. Harris, and has numberless business duties to perform in his
comfortable little office in the Hudson Theater. He writes exclusively
for Mr. Harris, and has an interest in the profits of his plays,
besides the regular royalties, so that he has made a considerable
fortune out of three big successes. Mr. Forbes probably is the only
dramatist in the world who, in addition to writing his play, stages
it, attends to the details of business management, plans the
advertising campaign, and supervises the press work.

Winchell Smith, who made the comedy, "Brewster's Millions", and who is
author of "The Fortune Hunter", says he chose dramatic authorship
"because you don't have to be grammatical in plays." "I couldn't write
a magazine article for a million dollars", he adds, "but dialogue
comes easy to me." However, Mr. Smith, like many others of his cult,
hates "the drudgery of composition." He likes to plan a new piece, but
wishes that the manuscript "could be got out of my head by a surgical
operation." Mr. Smith is a tall, slender, diffident young man, with a
keen sense of humor and a varied experience. He began life in the
grain and feed business in Hartford, and acted for many years in
support of that still more celebrated Hartfordian, William Gillette.
Langdon Mitchell, author of "The New York Idea", and John Luther Long,
author of "Madame Butterfly", both are Philadelphians. Mr. Mitchell
won fame as a poet, under the pseudonym of John Philip Varley, before
"Becky Sharp" brought him to the attention of theater-goers. Mr. Long,
whose ethereal fancies are so charming, pretends to practice the
prosaic profession of law at 629 Walnut street.

Eugene Presbrey, grey-bearded, vibrant, intense, devotes himself
mainly to the adaptation of novels. "I want the novel that can't be
dramatized!" he declares, and, for this reason, he found much pleasure
in doing "Raffles." It seemed a hopeless task to win sympathy for a
confirmed criminal, and Mr. Presbrey had about abandoned the task,
when, one evening in Seventh Avenue, he saw a man running at top
speed, a crowd in pursuit, and heard the cry: "Stop thief!" "The
fellow was just behind me", says the author, "and, turning around, I
got a good view of his hunted, desperate expression. Before I knew
what I was doing, I whispered: 'Get up the alley!' _And I didn't tell
the policeman._ 'No sympathy for a criminal!' I exclaimed to myself,
when I had leisure to analyze my action. 'Why, every human being is a
criminal at heart! He knows that, under certain circumstances, he
might be the fugitive, and he feels sorry for the other fellow in
proportion.'" Mr. Presbrey wrote "Raffles" in three weeks, and it has
been acted in every country that boasts a theater.

I have at my side a list of some thirty men and women who write plays
and of whom I could chat indefinitely. Each of these authors is so
interesting, all of them have lived so many stories, that it is hard
for me to admit a space limit and forebear being their Boswell. There
is George Broadhurst, lean and business-like, who made a reputation by
his farces, and then, when that had been forgotten, made another by
his serious dramas. There is Paul Potter, white-haired, rotund,
genial, the intimate friend of Charles Frohman, and the adaptor of
"Trilby." There are earnest young William C. De Mille, author of
"Strongheart"; Paul Kester, a wisp of a lad, timid and self-conscious,
who glories in swashbuckling melodramas and who did "When Knighthood
Was in Flower"; Thompson Buchanan, newspaper reporter to his finger
tips, who landed a big success in "A Woman's Way" and afterward wrote
"The Cub"; Sydney Rosenfeld, the wit and dreamer, one time editor of
Puck, who refused to turn out a book sub rosa with Augustus Thomas
because he objected to any scheme "which involved pooling our separate
fames to become anonymous"; and there are a whole army of brilliant
young chaps, like William J. Hurlbut, of "The Fighting Hope", who
lives a stone's throw from me at Shoreham, L. I., and Avery Hopwood,
who collaborated with me in producing "Clothes", and with Mary Roberts
Rhinehart in producing "Seven Days."

I should like to tell you about pretty Margaret Mayo, who has built a
villa from the proceeds of "Polly of the Circus", and whose first fame
as a playwright was achieved under circumstances described elsewhere
in this book. Rachel Crothers is a sedate, New Englandish young
woman, who used to teach acting in the Wheatcroft School, and whom I
met when she was going from office to office with the manuscript of
"The Three of Us." Rida Johnson, famed for "Brown of Harvard" and "The
Lottery Man", is tall, dark, fine-looking, and her professional career
began when she was leading woman for her husband, James Young, in her
first play, "Lord Byron." I can't make you acquainted with people in a
line--only Kipling can do that--and a proper description of all our
playwrights would fill a volume.

They are, for the most part, a quiet, unassuming lot, constituting, of
course, the brains of the theater, and lacking wholly the pose and
self-importance of their creature, the actor. They are of the stage,
and yet singularly apart from it, the glare of the footlights being
merged for them with the soft red glow of the library. I am glad to
have been their press agent this little time, for the majority of them
are almost unknown to the very throngs they entertain vicariously. The
wig-maker has his name on the program in larger letters than they,
and the chorus girl receives infinitely more attention from the
newspapers. More than any other class of men, I believe them to be
actuated by the desire to do fine things. "I want to write plays that
add to the joy of life!" exclaims one of the cult, looking over my
shoulder. "I shall never write a play that does not contain something
of hope and happiness!"

[Illustration: "_Margaret Mayo built a villa from the the proceeds of
'Polly of the Circus'_"]




_STAGE STRUCK_

     Being a diagnosis of the disease, and a description of its
     symptoms, which has the rare medical merit of attempting a cure
     at the same time.


"From the stern life of an officer in Uncle Sam's Navy to a merry job
carrying a spear in the chorus of a musical comedy may be a far cry",
but that is the step which a metropolitan newspaper recently recorded
as having been taken by a young man named in the story whose beginning
is quoted above. On another page of this same newspaper was an article
which announced that "because pink teas, bridge whist, and dances no
longer amused her", a certain "society woman" had joined the chorus of
a company appearing at the Casino. These two cases composed a single
day's list of casualties from the malignant disease known as
stage-fever.

When my eye had finished its journey over the accounts of the
"society woman" and the naval officer, I paused to wonder whether
either of these aspirants would be checked by seeing spread-headed
over the first page of the journal in question the horrid details of a
theatrical suicide. The night before, an actress of reputation--a
woman who had won everything that these new-comers had but a faint
chance of winning--had killed herself in an hotel in Baltimore. Of
course, it had not been shown that this "star" was influenced by any
circumstance connected with her work, and, of course, it is true that
people of various professions are self-slain, and yet--I wondered.

[Illustration: "_The malignant disease_"]

If the naval officer was restrained in his resolve it was not for
long. A week or so later I saw this impetuous youth, who couldn't
stand "being bottled up on a battle-ship", on the stage of an up-town
theater. He was standing near the middle of a row of young men, waving
his hands at stated intervals, and singing "yes--yes" at the end of
every second line rendered by the principal comedian. He had but to
wave his hands a moment too soon or too late in order to incur a fine
or a reprimand. Perhaps by this time he has discovered that there are
worse misfortunes than being "bottled up on a battleship."

Whether he does or not, the stream of the stage-struck will continue
to flow like the brook poeticized by Tennyson. There is no stopping
it. Youth has a better chance of missing measles or scarlet-fever than
of escaping that consuming passion to "go on the stage." Nearly
everyone struggles with the mania for a time; the wise conquer it, the
foolish make up the comic opera choruses, the unimportant road
companies, and the stage-door-keeper's list of "extra ladies and
gentlemen." From every class and walk of life, from every town and
city troop the victims, abandoning their vocations and their homes, as
though they had heard the witching notes of a siren song. They come
with high hopes and bright dreams, most of them to the great, gay city
of New York, where they besiege the agencies, and the managers, and
the teachers of acting until their dreams fade, or their money gives
out, or they are smitten with realization. There is hardly a community
in the country so small as to be without its "amateur dramatic club",
and no one even distantly connected with the theatrical profession has
lacked his or her experience with the innoculated unfortunate who
knows that "I could succeed if I only had a chance."

Some time ago I happened to be in Syracuse, and used the long-distance
telephone to communicate with New York. My conversation over, I sat
down in the hotel lobby, and had just lit a cigar when a page
announced: "Long distance wants you." I returned to the booth. "Yes?"
I inquired. A woman's voice replied: "I overheard enough of your talk
with New York to judge that you're in the theatrical business."

"I'm indirectly connected with it", I replied.

"Well", said the voice, "I'm the long-distance operator, and I want to
go on the stage. Please get me an engagement."

I explained my misfortune in being acquainted with no manager who was
likely to consider extensive training in enunciation of "hello" and
"busy" sufficient education for the stage. The lady probably didn't
believe me, for it is the popular impression that anyone concerned in
the business of the playhouse has only to ask in order to receive a
contract for whomever he wishes to assist. That song-heroine, who
declared herself "an intimate friend of an intimate friend of
Frohman", has her prototype in real life. Moreover, no aspirant to
footlight honors ever can be convinced that actors must be made as
well as born, and that there may be a few people in the world, who,
given the opportunity, would not become Modjeskas and Mansfields.

William A. Brady once was served at dinner by a waitress whose
surliness astonished him. He made no remark, however, and at last the
waitress addressed him. "You're William A. Brady", she said; "ain't
you?"

Mr. Brady confessed.

[Illustration: "'_You're William A. Brady, ain't you?_'"]

"Well", exclaimed the duchess of dishes, "my name's Minnie Clark. I've
been a waitress since I was fourteen years old, and I think I can
stand it until about next Wednesday. Give me a job, will you?"

David Belasco had a less amusing experience with a chambermaid in
Attleboro, Mass., where he spent a night with the organization
supporting David Warfield in "The Auctioneer." This girl, whose tap at
the door interrupted the wizard producer while he was blue-penciling a
scene, had just heard of his presence in town, and lost no time
approaching him. She had been stage-struck since childhood. Hearing of
Mr. Belasco's success in teaching dramatic art, she had determined to
visit him in New York. "I saved my money for three years", she said,
"and then I went up to you. I called at your office every day, but
they wouldn't let me in. When all my money was spent I came back home,
and began saving again. I had about half enough when I found that you
were coming to Attleboro." Mr. Belasco was unable to give the girl
the least encouragement. She was wholly illiterate, and, moreover, her
death warrant was writ on her face. She was suffering from an
incurable disease of the lungs.

Collin Kemper, one of the managers of the Astor Theater, recently had
a letter from an elderly priest, who, after twenty years in the
pulpit, felt that he wanted "a larger field of expression", and
yearned to play Shakespeare. A wrinkled old woman of sixty sought the
late Edward Marble, when he was conducting a school of acting in
Baltimore, and confided in him her desire to be seen as Juliet. This
desire she had cherished nearly half a century when the death of a
relative gave her the means of gratifying her ambition. Daniel Frohman
once received a young man, who laid on his desk a letter of
introduction from an acquaintance in the West. "Ah!" said Mr. Frohman.
"So you wish to become an actor?"

"Yes", replied the young man. "I'm puh-puh-puh-perfectly wa-wa-willing
to ba-ba-ba-begin at the ba-bottom--"

[Illustration: "_A wrinkled old woman confided her desire to be seen
as Juliet_"]

He stuttered hopelessly.

The most astonishing feature of stage fever, however, is that its
ravages are not confined to the ranks of people who would be bettered
by success in their chosen profession. My wealthiest friend, a silk
importer, who owns a charming home in Central Park West, dines alone
while his wife stands in the wings of a dirty little theater in Paris,
where their only daughter earns a hundred francs a week by dancing. A
successful literary man of my acquaintance, who would cheerfully
devote his entire income, something more than fifteen thousand a year,
to making his young wife happy in his cozy apartment yields per force
to her wish to appear in vaudeville. The most valuable member of the
staff of an out-of-town newspaper, recipient of a big salary, suddenly
threw up his position two years ago, since when he has been employed
seven weeks, and that seven weeks in an organization presenting "The
Chinatown Trunk Mystery."

A. L. Wilbur, at the time when he conducted the well-known Wilbur
Opera Company, printed in the program of his performances an
advertisement for chorus girls. Successful applicants were paid twelve
dollars a week, yet recruits came by the dozens from the best families
in the territory through which the aggregation was touring. Scores of
the young women who play merry villagers on Broadway today are well
born and bred victims of the virus. "Society" has contributed even to
the ranks of the chorus men, whose caste is far below that of their
betighted sisters. When Maybelle Gilman opened her metropolitan season
in "The Mocking Bird" a male chorister, whose weekly stipend was
eighteen dollars, electrified the management by purchasing nine boxes.
This Croesus of the chorus proved to be "Deacon" Moore, a Cornell
graduate and son of one of the biggest mine operators in the West.

The germ of stage fever frequently is as slow to get out of the system
as it is quick to enter it. Douglas Fairbanks is a clever comedian,
who, after a long apprenticeship, has been elevated to the stellar
rank by William A. Brady. Mr. Fairbanks fell in love with the daughter
of Daniel J. Sully, and, according to report, was given parental
permission to marry her if he would abandon his profession. Mr.
Fairbanks retired from the stage, and was out of the cast of "The Man
of the Hour" for a trifle less than two months. Margaret Fuller came
to town a few years ago with an ambition to star. She enlisted the
help of a well-known manager, who told her that he would give her a
chance to play Camille if she could get rid of twenty pounds of
superfluous flesh. Miss Fuller presented "Camille" at a special
matinee, and has not been heard of since. She is still in the
theatrical profession, content with minor roles, but clinging
tenaciously to the vocation. There are hundreds of men and women
haunting the agencies in New York, promenading that graveyard of
buried hopes, The Great White Way, who might be enjoying the comfort
of luxurious homes and the affectionate care of doting relatives.

In nine cases out of ten the mania to go on the stage is prompted by
pure desire for glorification. Love of excitement, and the fallacious
notion that the profession is one of comparative ease and luxury, may
be alloying factors, but the essence of the virus is vanity. No other
field offers the same quick approval of successful effort, and no
other climber is quite so much the center of his eventual triumph. In
the other arts, approbation follows less promptly and is less direct.
The fortunate player hears the intoxicating music of applause a dozen
times every evening and two dozen times on matinee days. He struts
about his mimic world, the observed of all observers, conscious of the
strained attention of the thousands who have paid to see him,
profiting not only by his own achievements but by those of the author,
the director, the scene-painter and the orchestra. The newspapers are
full of his praise and his photographs, recording his slightest doing
and giving to the opinions expressed by him, or by his press agent,
an importance scarcely less than might be accorded the President of
the United States. In the course of time he even begins to arrogate to
himself the heroic virtues of the characters he impersonates. It is
sweet to see one's name on the cover of a novel, sweet to scrawl one's
autograph in the lower left-hand corner of a painting, but O, how
doubly and trebly sweet to meet one's own image lithographed under a
laudatory line and posted between advertisements of the newest
breakfast food and the latest five cent cigar!

The temptation is the stronger, as the rewards are more numerous, if
the aspirant happens to be a woman. The gentler sex may not have
greater vanity than the stronger, but it takes greater delight in
commendation and it has keener appreciation of luxury. If the
much-mentioned "society belle" longs for the glitter and gaud supposed
to exist behind the footlights, how can one blame the daughters of
poverty and squalor who make up the rank and file of the chorus?
James Forbes has embodied the minds of these girls in his Patricia
O'Brien in "The Chorus Lady." What wonder that they try to escape the
sordid commonplaces of their poor lives for the glory of the theater,
and delight to strut their "brief hour" in a palace, even if that
palace be of canvas and scantling? The prospect of diamonds and
automobiles cannot exert a stronger appeal to the men and women who
dwell in dreary drudgery than does the hope of becoming _somebody_, of
enjoying even a temporary illumination of their obscurity.

Charles Dickens vividly explained the psychology of this longing for
prominence in his chapter on "Private Theaters" in "Sketches by Boz."
In his day there were scores of these institutions in London, each
"the center of a little stage-struck neighborhood." In the lobby of
each was hung a placard quoting the price for which willing amateurs
might play certain desirable parts. To be the Duke of Glo'ster, in
"Richard III", cost £2, the part being well worth that amount
because "the Duke must wear a real sword, and, what is better still,
he must draw it several times in the course of the piece." We have no
such private theaters on this side of the water, but there are nearly
two hundred amateur dramatic clubs in Brooklyn, while other
communities possess these organizations in proportion to their size.

[Illustration: "_How sweet to meet one's own image_"]

There are three well-trod roads to the stage. One wanders through
membership in a society like those mentioned, another and straighter
is by way of the dramatic schools, while the third, and most
frequented, goes direct from the home to the office of agent or
manager. Of dramatic schools the number is legion, but only those
conducted by dishonest adventurers promise employment to the enrolled
student. "Be an actor for $1", is the alluring caption of an
advertisement carried weekly by a number of periodicals, but the
aspirants who make it profitable for that institution to go on
advertising must be exceptionally gullible. New York has many
"academies" in which useful technicalities of the art are carefully
taught, and the managers of several of these "academies" keep in close
touch with the producing interests of the country. While they
guarantee nothing, they frequently are able to place their graduates
in small parts. Grace George, Margaret Illington, and other well-known
stars have come out of these schools.

The direct path to which reference has been made is full of
difficulties and obstacles. Agencies are established with the purpose
of helping communication between managers and the actors most in
demand. They are busy places, with little time to devote to the
novice, and the average impressario is not more nearly inaccessible
than their executive heads. Every year the producing manager is less
inclined to see applicants or to make opportunities for people of whom
he knows nothing. It is all very well to be recommended by some
acquaintance of the man who "presents", but friendship is only
friendship, and nobody will risk the success of a production that has
cost thousands of dollars merely to please an associate. The current
method of selecting a company is quick and simple. A copy of the
play's cast is sent to the manager, who writes opposite each character
the name of the actor whom he thinks most likely to interpret that
role to advantage. Then the manager's secretary sends for the
fortunate Thespian. This system is undeniably hard, and perhaps unjust
to the beginner, but such sentiment as gets into the theater comes in
manuscripts, and, in these days of severe critical judgment, the
investor in drama has the fullest right to minimize his risk.

Out of every hundred tyros who come to town in search of an engagement
ten may secure the coveted prize, and not more than one person out of
that ten makes a decent living from his or her adopted profession. It
is too much to say that one aspirant in a thousand achieves real
success. The average salary in the chorus is $18, and for speaking
parts in dramatic performances it cannot be more than $40. No one is
paid during the period devoted to rehearsal, and a long season lasts
somewhere between thirty and thirty-five weeks. The sane way of
computing wages in the theatrical business, therefore, is to multiply
by thirty and divide the result by fifty-two. Following this system,
it will be seen that the seeming $40 a week really is only $23. The
most ardent and ambitious among the stage-struck will admit that this
is not an income permitting the employment of a chauffeur or the
purchase of a palatial residence on Riverside Drive.

Nor is the matter of remuneration the only disappointment connected
with entrance into the theatrical profession. This is the one vocation
in which the worker must begin again every year. If the
fairly-successful actor "gets something" for the current season, he
will find almost equal difficulty in getting something else for the
season to follow. Unless he has made a prodigious hit--and prodigious
hits are very rare--he finds himself no farther advanced next June
than he was last September. Should he be lucky enough to remain in New
York, he occupies a hall room in a boarding house, and, failing in
this doubtful good fortune, he faces a long term on "the road."
Excepting only solitary confinement in prison, the world probably
holds no terror surpassing that of touring the "one night stands."
Lost to his best friends and companions, travelling at all hours of
the day and night, grateful for board and lodging that would not be
tolerated by a domestic servant, the player with a small road company
has ample reason to repent his choice of a career. To illustrate the
universal dread of this fate, I quote the lines printed under a comic
picture in the Christmas issue of a prominent dramatic weekly:

     DOCTOR--You're pretty badly run down, my friend. I should
     advise change of scene.

     PATIENT--(Just returned from thirty weeks of "one night stands"
     with the Ripping Repertoire Company). Heaven have mercy on me!
     (He dies).

Of course, it is quite futile to recite facts like these to the
victim of stage fever. That unhappy individual is certain that he or
she will positively enjoy such discomforts as your feeble fancy can
paint, and doubly sure that the ugly present will fade into a roseate
future just as it does in the transformation scene at the end of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin." Tell this adventurer that one histrion in a
thousand succeeds and your reply is bound to be: "I'll be that one."
And, to speak truth, he or she _may_ be that one. Celebrated actors
are made from queer material sometimes, and the roster of well-known
people on our stage includes the names of men and women who were
originally plumbers, waitresses, floor-walkers and cloak-models. The
beginner may be positive, however, that these players did not advance
while they still had the intellects and the training required in the
occupations mentioned. No person can possibly succeed on the dramatic
stage without the foundation of genuine talent and a superstructure of
culture and education. A woman whose pronunciation betrayed the
baseness of her early environment could not win enduring fame if she
had the temperament of a Bernhardt.

Generally, however, the woman who thinks she has the temperament of a
Bernhardt really has only anaemia and a great deal of vanity. If she
has not mistaken her symptoms, and, besides genuine ability, has a
good education, some money, infinite patience, an iron constitution,
and a mind made up to the bitterness of long waiting and constant
disappointment, she may eventually win a position half as important
and a fourth as agreeable as that which she pictured in her
imagination.

She is far luckier if her desire to go on the stage proves akin to and
as fleeting as the average small boy's desire to be a burglar.




_ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY_

     Being an account of intrepid explorations in the habitat of the
     creatures whose habits are set forth in the preceding chapters.


The Great White Way is a recumbent letter I. It is recumbent because
the _habitues_ of the Rialto have used it to the point of exhaustion,
and because streets are never vertical except in Naples. The Rialto is
the name by which The Great White Way was known before the present
reckless mania for electric signs suggested the more significant
appellation. In that long-ago time one who spoke of the district in
question referred to Broadway between the Star Theatre and the office
of The Dramatic Mirror. The Great White Way is bounded on the South by
the Flatiron Building, on the West by the Metropolitan Opera House, on
the North by an enormous incandescent spread-eagle advertising a
certain kind of beer, and on the East by the Actors' Society.
Around these material landmarks runs an invisible but insurmountable
wall of clannishness and complacent self-satisfaction. To be on the
Great White Way you have only to leave the Subway at Times Square; to
be of it you must follow the Biblical camel through the eye of a
needle.

[Illustration: "_The Great White Way is a recumbent letter I_"]

There isn't another Great White Way on the face of the earth. Paris
has its Place de l'Opera, London its Strand, and Vienna its
Ringstrasse, but these resemble New York's theater path only as a
candle resembles an arc light. They are streets given up to seekers
after pleasure; the Rialto is a street given up to seekers after
pleasure, and to seekers after seekers after pleasure. It is not the
moths attracted to the flame that lend particular interest to the
Great White Way; it is the flame itself, coruscating, scintillant,
multi-hued and glowing. Broadway, within the limits set down, is a
street of players and playhouses; the only mile of pavement in the
world devoted entirely to the members of one profession.

Two newspaper buildings rear themselves defiantly in this portion of
New York. They seem out of place, though newspaper men are
night-workers, too, and come nearer than any other class of men to
being _of_ The Great White Way. A few tailors and haberdashers have
intruded themselves into the district, settling beside wig makers and
sellers of grease paint, but they are neither numerous nor
ostentatious. Broadway, as you walk from Twenty-third Street to
Forty-seventh, unfolds itself to the view as a line of theaters,
theatrical offices, agencies and all-night restaurants. Outsiders go
there to see performances and to eat; insiders make of it a world of
their own--a queer little, blear little world of unclear visions,
abnormal instincts, unreal externals and astigmatic sense of
proportion.

Parisians call their actors "_M'as-tu-vu_", which means "Have you seen
me?" That is because the first question a French actor asks is "Have
you seen me in such-and-such a role?" Your true American actor doesn't
waste time with a question of that sort. He feels a peaceful
certainty that not to know him argues yourself unknown, and he
wouldn't like to hint at such obscurity for an acquaintance. Take all
the talk of all the year on The Great White Way, run it through a
wringer, and you will have that same letter I, with vanity dripping
from every inch of the texture. Such egotism as the rest of creation
entertains is watered brandy to that of the Thespian. He thinks of
only one thing, he can talk of only one thing, all the affairs in the
world are inconsequential in comparison with that one thing, and that
one thing is himself. Stand at my elbow while I halt my friend Junius
B. Starr at the corner of Fortieth and Broadway. "How are you, old
man?" say I.

"Fine", is his reply. "Been playing the 'heavy' with Florence Rant
since November. Everybody said I 'hogged the show.'"

Half a block farther along we will have occasion to mention a business
matter to Sue Brette. "My agent tells me you would go into vaudeville
if you had a 'sketch.' She mentioned the possibility of my writing one
for you."

"Yes. I spoke to her about your giving me a part like the one I played
in 'The Greatness of the Small.' You know that was the engagement I
lost because I was so much better than the leading woman. She took the
piece off and revived 'Across the Divide', and I handed in my notice.
The play ended with me dancing on the table--"

Twenty minutes later we saunter on with a store of minute information
regarding Miss Brette's performance, and how it was enjoyed by the
world at large, but with our minds still in Darkest Africa so far as
the business of the meeting is concerned.

Most people are self-conscious when they speak highly of themselves.
Not so actors, to whom such statements as "Everybody said I was the
best they had ever seen" or "Alan Dale came three nights running just
to watch me" are simply a matter of course. Long thought in this
strain has so accustomed the people of the stage to talking in the
same fashion that they find nothing extraordinary about it. Then, too,
his distorted sense of proportion makes the actor see himself so large
and the rest of the world so small that he cannot conceive of any mind
which will not grasp, with unalloyed delight, at first-hand
information regarding himself. Newspapers have flattered your average
histrion into the idea that an eager humanity waits impatiently for
accounts of his most unimportant doings. During the term of my press
agency, a certain comedienne whose specialty is burnt cork ran after
me along Broadway one afternoon, crying: "Stop! I've got a great news
'story' for you."

[Illustration: "_The actor sees himself so large, and the rest of the
world so small_"]

I stopped. "What is it?" I inquired.

"A man came up to me as I was leaving the stage door and said: 'Why,
you're not really colored, after all!'"

A star of my acquaintance recently dismissed an excellent business
manager because that individual mentioned the author of the play in
his advertising. "You're not working for Scribble; you're working for
me", was his comment. Another has ceased to be a friend because I told
him that I didn't care for his performance. A third has clippings of
the criticisms that have treated him best pasted on the inside of his
card case and shows them to you if he can get your ear and your
button-hole.

Everybody talks shop a good deal, but shop is the _only_ thing talked
on The Great White Way. Art and science and literature, politics and
wars and national calamities have no interest, if they have so much as
existence, for the player. "Awful catastrophe that earthquake in
'Frisco!" I exclaimed to an intimate I met at breakfast five or six
years ago.

"By George, yes!" said he. "Costs me twenty weeks I had booked over
the Orpheum Circuit."

Your shoe dealer, though he converses about shoes from eight in the
morning until six at night, at least drops the subject during the
evening. The typical histrion reads nothing in the papers except the
theatrical news and refuses steadfastly to discourse on any other
subject. This is equally true of the manager.

[Illustration: "_Alan Dale came three nights running_"]

The theatrical world is as much of and to itself as though the Rialto
were a tiny island isolated in the waters of the Pacific. It has its
own language, its own daily journal, its own celebrities and its own
great events. The jargon spoken would be absolutely unintelligible to
a layman. "I doubled the heavy and a character bit because the Guv'ner
said cuttin' everything down was our only chance to stay out. We hit
'em hard in Omaha, and it looked like a constant sell out to me, but
the Guv'ner swore the show was a frost and we was playin' to paper."
What would be your translation of this, gentle reader? Doesn't sound
like English, does it? Yet it is--English as you hear it on Broadway.

The Telegraph is the organ of the theatrical profession. It is a
morning paper published at midnight for the benefit of a clientele
that has plenty of time for reading between that hour and bed time.
The Telegraph is the connecting link between the last editions of the
"yellow" evening papers, most of which, by the way, are pink, and the
"bull dog editions" of the regular morning papers. It is the one daily
in the world devoted exclusively to sport and the theater. To its
editorial staff and its readers a declaration of war between England
and France wouldn't be worth half the space given to a street fight
between two matinee idols. The followers of this journal might be a
trifle shakey as to the identity of Christopher Wren, but they could
answer without hesitation any question relating to "Ted" Marks. They
are awake to conditions, physical and domestic, utterly strange to
outsiders, and understand personal allusions that would be Greek to
the best-informed editorial writer on The London Times. If you picked
up a newspaper and read "Famous Sayings of Great Men--Charles Hepner
Meltzer: 'If it's hair it's here'" you would be mystified, yet fifty
thousand theatrical people read that quip on the day of its
publication and laughed at it heartily.

The populace of The Great White Way is not more sharply individual in
its mentality than in its personality. You could not possibly mistake
the types that congregate on street corners or shuttle to and fro on
business bent. The stoutish, smooth-shaven, commonplace-looking young
fellow who passes you with a stride is a well-known dramatic author
whose latest play is in its third month at a near-by theater. The
long-haired man behind him whom you notice because of his deep-set
eyes, his tapering fingers and his important bearing is not the great
genius that you may suppose him, but an ambitious provincial come to
town to market his first comedy. Sybilla Grant, whose real name is
Carrie O'Brien, and who gets eighteen dollars per week for wearing a
five hundred dollar gown conspicuously in the chorus at the Casino,
drives to the door of Rector's, while the most prosperous and
profitable woman star in America walks quietly down Broadway, a demure
little figure in a gray tailor-made gown. The old actor, with frayed
linen and threadbare suit, idles about, a trifle the worse for
liquor, inquiring after opportunities; the young actor flaunts along
in company with a well known theatrical lawyer or a soubrette
conspicuous for the fearfulness and wonderfulness of her millinery and
her coiffure. Dogs you see in plenty, attached and unattached, but no
children. The Great White Way is a childless path.

There are so many celebrities on Broadway that, if you are a familiar
of the street, you cease to regard them with awe. Men and women whose
names fill newspapers and whose pictures crowd magazines meet you at
every turn. During the hour's time required for lunching I have seen
in one hotel eating room Henry Arthur Jones, Charles Klein, John
Kendrick Bangs, Winthrop Ames, George Ade, Paul West, Edgar Selwyn,
Roy McCardell, Victor Herbert, Reginald De Koven, Raymond Hubbell,
Manuel Klein, Archie Gunn, Hy. Mayer, David Warfield, Frank Keenan,
Robert Hilliard, William Faversham, Wilton Lackaye, Theodore Roberts,
Henry Miller, Arnold Daly, W. H. Crane, Francis Wilson, Edmund
Breese, Henry Woodruff, Sam Bernard, Charles J. Ross, Daniel Frohman,
Henry B. Harris, Lee Shubert, Fred W. Whitney, Charles B. Dillingham,
J. W. Jacobs, Ben Roeder, David Belasco, Joseph Brooks, Marc Klaw and
Abraham L. Erlanger. The gentleman who was sharing my table called
attention to the gathering and remarked that if the building should
tumble about our ears, the result would be temporary paralysis in
theatricals.

[Illustration: "_Gets eighteen dollars per week for wearing a five
hundred dollar gown_"]

The Great White Way has certain hostelries at which certain classes in
"the profession" lunch, dine and sup habitually. Nearly every manager
of importance in New York goes to the Knickerbocker, the Madrid, or to
Rector's, the former place being popular also with the better sort of
actors. Shanley's, the Astor, the Cadillac, Browne's Chop House and
Keene's, which is in the old home of the Lambs Club, also are popular,
while the faster set, notably including the well known women of
musical comedy, affect Churchill's. In the vicinity of The Times
Building, and again in the neighborhood of The Herald, are a number of
little restaurants in which unlucky players and very busy managers can
get food cheaply and quickly. These places are to be recognized
generally by the white enamel lettering on their windows and by the
fact that they employ women as waiters. The busy manager aforesaid
goes into them fearlessly; the unlucky player contents the inner man
in the rear of the room and then stands complacently smoking his five
cent cigar in front of the more expensive eating-house next door.

There is the same divergence of character in lodging places on the
Rialto. Above Forty-second Street one finds fashionable apartment
houses in which prominent players keep rooms the year around. Farther
down are hotels in which the less-successful histrion stops when he is
in town, and the cross streets still closer to the foot of the The
Great White Way are full of theatrical boarding houses, in which a
good room may be had at four dollars per week and food and lodging at
sums varying from seven to ten dollars. The four clubs that appeal
especially to "the profession" are the Lambs, the Players, the
Greenroom and the Friars. The first of these is the most expensive,
the most luxurious, and the most liked by the gilded set. It occupies
a new and beautiful building on Forty-fourth Street near Broadway. The
Players, founded by Edwin Booth, is quiet, conservative and elegant,
inhabiting now, as it did in the beginning, an old-fashioned structure
in Gramercy Park. The Greenroom Club and The Friars are younger and
crowd themselves into less pretentious quarters on Forty-seventh and
Forty-fifth Streets. The Greenroom caters especially to managers, and
The Friars was founded by press agents.

The theaters near Broadway are too well known to call for much
comment. They include all the playhouses of the better class, about
thirty-five in number, beginning with Wallack's and ending with the
New Theater. A great majority of the big--I'm not alluding to
physical appearance--producers have their executive offices in these
Temples of Thespis. The Knickerbocker Theater Building shelters many
of them, as do the Broadway Theater Building, the Gaiety Theater
Building and the Putnam Building. Charles Frohman works in a tidy and
well furnished apartment in the Empire Theater Building, which is
tenanted almost exclusively by his staff. The Shuberts have
headquarters in what was once the Audubon Hotel, opposite the Casino,
at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street, and Klaw and Erlanger transact
their business in the New Amsterdam Theater Building. The New York
Theater Building, the Hudson Theater Building, the George M. Cohan
Theater Building, the Astor Theater Building, and even that home of
burlesque, the Columbia Theater Building, all are honey-combed with
offices.

The word "honey-combed" is used advisedly. All day long, all year
'round these offices are veritable hives of business. The layman has
not the least conception of the amount of activity necessary to
theatrical production. It is not too much to say that such an office
as that of Klaw & Erlanger is visited by no fewer than two thousand
persons _per diem_ and that as many letters are dispatched from it.
Such buildings as those mentioned are most crowded from July to
December. Regardless of the fact that theatrical companies are made up
nowadays almost entirely by the process of sending for the players who
are wanted, thousands of men and women in search of work begin their
annual promenade late in June. They wait patiently, hour after hour,
in outer offices, where the men usually find seats and the women
generally stand. The matinee idol who last season nightly shouldered
the blame for a great crime in order to shield the brother of the girl
he loved, pushes past scores of girls somebody loves in order to be
first before the desk of the manager. Through the long summer months,
The Great White Way, whiter than ever in the dazzling heat of the sun,
is thronged with seekers after employment in the most overcrowded
profession in the world. From place to place they go, from manager's
office to agency, securing nothing more definite than the suggestion
that they leave their names and addresses.

Of late the Rialto in summer has been so crowded with loungers that a
special squad of police has been required to keep the way open to
ordinary pedestrians. Knots of players, the men recognizable by their
smooth-shaven faces and mobile mouths, the women by that peculiar
independence of convention which characterizes the feminine portion of
"the profession", group themselves everywhere. Seeing a hub of people,
with projecting spokes made up of dogs on strings, you may be quite
sure of the conversation. "I could 'a' been with 'Get-Rich-Quick
Wallingford', but everybody had it touted for a failure, so I signed
for stock in Minneapolis. We only lasted two weeks. If the manager'd
had any nerve, I think we'd 'a' won out. The whole town was talking
about my work in 'Salomy Jane', and, my dear, you know what I could
'a' done in 'Brewster's Millions'!"

The soil most favorable to the growth of these groups is in front of
the Actors' Society, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Knickerbocker
Theater Building, and the Putnam Building. The "sportier" class of men
congregate before the Hotel Albany, where they cooly ogle the women
who pass. Never by any chance does one find a manager in a gathering
like this--not even a salaried manager or a press agent. "Hold
themselves aloof", you think; and they do, not only from these folk of
the lower crust, but from the best class of actors as well. Race
hatred and political prejudice are as nothing in comparison with the
feeling between the business man of the theater and the player. Each
despises the other, more or less secretly, and, except on the neutral
ground of the Lambs', each "herds" alone.

The Great White Way is most nearly deserted at nine in the morning.
Then the rounder has gone to bed and the workman has not yet risen.
Surface cars laden with humanity pass and repass, but they do not
disgorge in the Rialto. The shop doors yawn widely, displaying blank
faces to the straggling typists who wander by. Hotel dining-rooms are
deserted, chairs piled upon the tables, and sleepy waiters leaning
disconsolately against the walls. Lowered curtains betray the
tardiness of the people whose duty it is to open the offices of
agents, play-brokers, and managers. Even the theater lobbies are
vacant. Ten o'clock brings prosperous-looking men, hustling to and
fro; and eleven sees the beginning of the actors' parade. By noon
Broadway is a river of humanity, flowing steadily to the sea of
Ambition.

It is not until night, however, that it becomes clear why the street
should have the name that has been given it. Then the hundreds of
queer-looking signs you have seen through the day suddenly take on
light and life; burning blue birds fly "for happiness", glittering
chariot-horses race beneath illuminative memoranda of the virtues of
table waters, sparkling wine pours itself iridescently into a glowing
glass; millions of little electric jewels flash in the darkness;
whole buildings burst into premeditated flame; facades blaze like
giant fireworks ignited for a festival; and Broadway becomes in truth
The Great White Way. Standing beside The Herald Building and staring
northward, one sees a horizontal tower of glistening globes, the
"river of humanity" with a wonderful electric display on its banks.
The cars now begin to give up throngs from their lighted interiors,
pedestrians block the sidewalks, policemen shrill their regulation of
traffic, at Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue the crush of
carriages is well-nigh impassible. Fifty thousand people pour into the
playhouses, to pour out again three hours later, super-man to become
supper man, and to add his grandeur, and his lady's, to the crowded
lobster palaces that line this dazzling path of pleasure. These are
darkened in time, and there are left only the all-night restaurants.
The streets grow quiet, and the pink dawn, unseen save by the
watchmen, unfolds itself over the house-tops. One by one the stars
disappear, fading into the day, as will those other stars, so little,
so infinitesimal, so transient a part of that tiny world which they in
their vainglory have christened The Great White Way.




_WHAT HAPPENS AT REHEARSALS_

     Being something about the process by which performances are got
     ready for the pleasure of the public and the profit of the
     ticket speculators.


"You see, I've been fishing, too."

"Hello! Only you--"

"Wait! Mr. Leeds, I've told you a dozen times to count five before
that entrance!"

"I thought I--"

"Never mind what you thought! Go back! Now!"

"Hello! Only you two here! What's become of--"

"Wait!... Flynn, take this entrance for the sunset cue. Dim your
borders and throw in your reds.... Now, Mr. Leeds, once more!"

Doesn't make sense, does it? Yet this is a commonplace passage from an
ordinary dress rehearsal. Anybody really connected with theatricals
could translate the extract at a glance, but intimate knowledge of the
stage, and its language, is gained only by actual experience. Of the
method of producing plays, more has been written and less is generally
understood than of any other common process. The outsider who devotes
an hour to watching a rehearsal is as well qualified to describe that
function as you or I, after seeing a ship steam down the bay, would be
to pen a treatise on the science of navigation.

Most laymen have a vague idea that theatrical performances spring into
being full-fledged, like birds which prestidigitators hatch by the
simple expedient of shooting at the cage. If this statement seems
far-fetched, you have but to read the stories of the playhouse written
by clever men, like O. Henry and Hamlin Garland, whose wide knowledge
of most things under the sun does not seem to extend to things under
the calcium.

Rehearsals are much more than aimless walking and talking, as
navigation is more than the turning of a wheel. Their direction is a
fine art, a very fine art, not the least unlike the painting of a
miniature, and one must comprehend something of this art to explain or
describe it.

There are many points of similarity between a performance and a
painting, which must create an impression without reminding the
spectator of the brush-strokes which made that impression possible.
The preparation of a play is a succession of details. It is
astonishing how small a thing can cause the success or failure, if not
of the whole work, at least of an incident or an episode. A pause, a
movement, an expression, a light or a color may defeat or carry out
the intention of the dramatist.

William Gillette's melodrama, "Secret Service", has a scene in which a
telegraph operator, dispatching military orders, is shot in the hand.
When the piece was given its initial hearing, Mr. Gillette, in the
role of the operator, upon receiving the wound (1) bandaged his hand
with a handkerchief, (2) picked up his cigar, and (3) went on
"sending." There was no applause. The second night the "business" was
changed. The operator (1) picked up the cigar, (2) bandaged his hand,
and (3) went on "sending." The audience was vociferous in its
approval. This particular instance of the importance of trifles is
easily explained. That a wounded man's first thought should be to care
for the wound is not remarkable, but that his first thought should be
of his cigar suggests pluck and intrepidity which the spectators were
quick to appreciate. Frequently, however, author and actors experiment
for months before finding the thing that makes or mars a desired
effect.

The play-goer who believes himself a free agent does not understand
the art of the theater. That art being perfect, he restrains his
laughter and waits with his applause until the precise moment when the
stage director wants him to laugh or applaud. It often happens that a
laugh may spoil a dramatic situation, or that applause may not be
desirable at a particular time. For example, if an audience is
permitted to vent its enthusiasm over some stirring incident just
before the end of an act the applause after the act will be
appreciably less, and the number of curtain calls will be smaller. It
is a simple matter of mechanics to "kill" a laugh or a round of
applause, just as, in many cases, the impression made by an actor in a
situation may depend, not upon himself, but upon a detail of stage
direction.

When two actors have an important dialogue, each wants to stand
farther "up stage"--which is to say farther from the footlights--than
the other, because the person fartherest "up stage" is most likely to
dominate the scene. "It's no use", I once heard William A. Brady say
to a veteran, who was rehearsing with a young woman star. "She knows
the tricks as well as you do, and she'll back through the wall of the
theater before she'll give you that scene!"

The position of the player being of such consequence, it will be seen
at once that actors do not, as is commonly believed, roam about the
stage at will. In point of fact, they are practically automata,
reflecting the brain-pictures of the director and working out his
scheme. It is not unusual for the man in charge of a rehearsal to
instruct one of his puppets to "take six steps to the right at this
speech", or to "come down stage four steps." No person in a
performance ever "crosses" another person--that is, passes behind or
in front of that other person--without having been told just when and
how to do so. That movement which seems least premeditated often has
been most carefully planned, and you may be sure that, at the
performance you are witnessing, everybody on the stage knows to the
fraction of a yard where he or she will be standing at a given moment.
Edwin Booth's reply to a novice who inquired where he should go during
a long speech--"Wherever you are I'll find you"--would not be possible
from a stage director of today.

While this pre-arrangement may appear to the layman to be opposed to
any semblance of life and spontanaeity, it is absolutely necessary to
the giving of a smooth performance. If actors really "felt their
parts" they would be about as dependable as horses that "feel their
oats", and the representation in which they took part would soon
become utterly chaotic. Fancy the awkwardness of Bassanio, in the
trial scene of "The Merchant of Venice", looking around to find
Shylock before inquiring: "Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?"

Nor would this uncertainty be the worst effect of such unpreparedness.
On the stage every move, every gesture means something; conveys some
impression. Thus, in a dialogue in which one character is defying
another, a single step backward will produce the effect of cowardice,
or at least of weakness and irresolution, in the person who retreats.
The whole tension of a scene may be lost if one of the parties to it
so much as glances down or reaches out for some necessary article.

In the enactment of "The Traitor", a dramatization of the novel by
Thomas Dixon, Jr., we found that a certain passage between the
"lead", or hero, and the "heavy", or villain, failed of its intended
effect. The hero, John Graham, is brought into court handcuffed, and
seated in the prisoners' dock. Steve Hoyle goes to him with a taunt.
It was thought veracious, even suggestive of manliness, that Graham,
hearing the taunt, should rise angrily, as though prevented only by
his bonds from striking his foe. After two weeks of guessing and
experimenting, we discovered that this very natural movement, for some
reason still inexplicable, gave the impression of weakness. It is
minutae like this that must be considered at rehearsal, and taught so
carefully that the actor moves, as it were, in a groove, swerving from
the determined course only as a needle in a sewing machine swerves in
its downward stroke.

Accent and facial expression are planned by the stage director with
the same absolutism that marks his attention to manouvre. Few actors
can be counted upon to read every line intelligently, and frequently
the person in charge must stop a rehearsal to point out an
underlying thought. "You blur that speech", the director may say to
the actor. "You don't define the changes of thought which it implies.
See here! Jones says: 'I'll go to her with the whole story.' You
listen. Your first emotion is surprise. 'You will?' Suspicion enters
your mind. 'Then you----' The suspicion becomes certainty. 'Then you
love her, too!'" Thus, more frequently than will be believed by the
hero-worshipper, the much admired tone in which some big speech is
delivered is the tone of the teacher.

[Illustration: "_If actors really 'felt their parts'_"]

So much, so very much, may depend upon the emphasis given a single
word. The art of speaking, however, is not more part and parcel of a
perfect performance than the art of listening. The director not only
rehearses the manner of giving a sense, but the manner of receiving
it. He must note pronunciations, too, and, if there is an odd or
foreign name in the play, he must take care that all his people
pronounce it alike. The length of pauses, the tempo of comic or
serious conversations, the light and shade of the entire
representation depend upon his competence.

Drama is the Greek word for action, and so, in a play, what the people
_do_ is even more important than what they _say_. Practically every
motion made on the stage, except that of walking, comes under the head
of what is known technically as "business." Laymen who believe that
mummers act on their own initiative, even "making up" lines as they go
along, will be surprised to learn that the manuscript of a workmanlike
play contains more "business" than dialogue. The performer picks up a
photograph or lights a cigar or toys with a riding whip, not because
it has occurred to him to do so, but because the author has written
down what he must do, and how and when he must do it, and the stage
director has taught him properly to interpret the author.

Here is a page from the "prompt copy" of "Clothes." The unbracketed
sentences are dialogue; those in parenthesis are "business":

WEST.

I'm going to marry you in spite of----

     (Checks himself suddenly. Gets his hat and brushes it with his
     sleeve. Laughs a little.)

Pardon me. My temper is a jack-in-the-box. The cover is down again.
Goodnight.

     (Walks quickly to door L. C., and exits. OLIVIA stands still a
     moment, then throws herself into chair R. of table, and
     indulges in a torrent of tears. The bell rings. She sits
     upright and listens. It rings again. She rises and runs to door
     L. 2. E. The MAID enters.)

The capital letters--L. C., R., and L. 2. E. are abbreviations of
terms that indicate exact spots on the stage. You see, it is not left
to the discretion of West by which door he shall leave the room, nor
of Olivia into which chair she shall throw herself. This "business"
the director works over at rehearsal, elaborating, amplifying, making
clear. West is told precisely where he must find his hat, with which
arm he must brush it, in what tone he must laugh. If this were a case
where a pause would heighten the effect of an entrance, the maid would
be informed, as was the mythical Mr. Leeds in my opening paragraphs,
how many she must count, which is to say how long she must wait,
before entering.

The more experienced an author, the more definite, exhaustive and
significant his "business." When a play goes into rehearsal, however,
there are always places where speech may be exchanged for action, and
often, after a dramatist has seen his work on the stage, he is able to
cut whole pages, the sense of which is made clear by the appearance,
the manner, or the "business" of his people.

There are various kinds of "business", and of different purpose. The
old-fashioned stage director used to invent dozens of meaningless
things for actors to do, merely to "fill in", or give the appearance
of activity. It is related that, when the farce, "It's All Your
Fault", was being rehearsed, the man in charge insisted that Charles
Dickson, who was supposed to be calling at the room of a friend,
should "fill in" a long speech by taking a brush from a bureau drawer
and brushing his hair.

"But", protested Mr. Dickson, "I'm simply visiting. I can't use
another man's brush."

"Can't help that!" said the director. "There are long speeches here,
and you must do _something_ while they are being spoken."

This kind of stage management, however, is no longer general. It is
understood now that the best way to make a speech impressive is to
stand still and speak it, so that actors are not often given by-play
without some good reason.

"Business" may supply "atmosphere", as the spectacle of a man rubbing
his ears and blowing on his hands helps create the illusion of intense
cold. In the original production of "In the Bishop's Carriage", Will
Latimer, impersonated by a very slight young fellow, was supposed to
cowe Tom Dorgan, a thug of enormous bulk. The scene never carried
conviction, until our stage director hit upon an ingenious bit of
"business." He put a telephone on the table that stood between the two
men. Dorgan made a movement toward Latimer. Latimer, without flinching
or taking his eyes from Dorgan's face, laid his hand on the telephone.
That gesture suggested a world of power, the police station within
reach, law and society standing back of Latimer. It saved the
situation.

Much "business" is obvious and essential, as Voysin's fumbling in his
wife's dressing table, in "The Thief", since this fumbling leads to
the discovery of the bills upon the purloining of which the play is
built. If a small article is to be used importantly in a performance
it must be "marked", so that the audience will know what it is and so
that it will not seem to have appeared miraculously to fit the
occasion. The paper cutter falls off the table in the first act of
"The Witching Hour", not by accident, but by carefully thought out
design, so that the audience will know where the instrument is and
recognize it when Clay Whipple uses it to kill Tom Denning.
"Business", in a word, may be the smashing of a door or the picking up
of a pin. It is the adornment that makes an otherwise bald and
unconvincing narrative seem real; that translates mere dialogue into
the semblance of every-day life.

Many plays--even most plays--are substantially altered at rehearsal.
Dion Boucicault, the great Irish dramatist, said: "Plays aren't
written; they are rewritten." It has been proved utterly impossible to
judge the effect of a play from the manuscript, to know the merit of
any story or episode until it is visualized, translated into action.
Some time ago, William Gillette finished a farce, "That Little Affair
at Boyd's", to which he had devoted the greater part of a year, and in
which, therefore, he must have had considerable faith. Yet, after a
week's rehearsal, he dismissed the company engaged and abandoned the
idea of producing the piece. The soundness of his judgment was
demonstrated later when this farce, re-christened "Ticey", was revived
and failed utterly.

When defects manifest themselves at rehearsal, the director does not
hesitate to make or to suggest changes, the directness of his course
depending upon the standing of his author. No dramatist is a hero to
his stage director. Also, while we're parodying maxims, it's a wise
author that knows his own play on its first night.

The playwright is quick to learn humility. "Who's that meek-looking
chap?" somebody once asked Augustin Daly during the course of a trial
performance. "That!" returned Daly. "Oh, that's only the author!" If a
director is employed, the writer makes his suggestions through that
gentleman. Sometimes the experience of the producer, who brings a
fresh mind to the subject, is surer than the instinct of the author,
who may easily have lost sense of perspective from long association
with his work.

"The Three of Us", a well-known domestic comedy, depends for its chief
interest upon a scene in the third act, where Rhy MacChesney pays a
midnight visit to Louis Berresford. When the piece was put into
rehearsal, the idea was that Berresford, hearing a knock at the door,
bade the girl hide herself, which she did, only to be discovered
later. George Foster Platt, the stage director, who recently filled
that post at the New Theater, objected that this was trite,
conventional, unnecessary. "Why shouldn't the young woman tell the
truth--that she came on a perfectly legitimate errand, meaning no
harm, and that she has nothing to fear--and refuse to hide?" The
author adopted his view, a new scene was written, and the play,
largely because of the unexpectedness of this turn of affairs, ran for
an entire year at the Madison Square.

The knowledge of the stage director must cover the mechanical features
of production as well as the literary. It is essential that he should
understand the full value of light and scenic effects, and how to
produce them. A stage may be, and generally is, illuminated by means
of five different devices--from the "borders", which are directly
overhead; from calciums, in the balcony or on either side of the
stage; from spot lights, which really are calciums whose light is
focused upon one spot; from footlights, and from "strips", which are
placed wherever light from more remote sources would be obstructed.

The "borders" are long, inverted troughs, stretching from the extreme
left of the stage to the extreme right and suspended from the roof of
the theater. When it is said that the light coming from the "borders",
or, indeed, from anywhere else, may be raised or lowered, may be white
or blue or red or amber, or a combination of these colors, reproducing
the glow of a lamp, or the first gray glimmer of sunrise, it will be
understood that the director has a wide range of effects at his
command.

Just as the reading of a line may alter the impression created by an
entire passage, so may the least variation in illumination. Comedy
scenes, for example, must be played in full light, as sentimental
scenes are helped by half lights. If you could witness the second act
of "Charley's Aunt" performed in the steel blue of moonlight, and the
last act of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in the glare of "full up", you
would be amazed at the result.

Color has as subtle an influence. I have seen the people in a play
fairly melt into the background of a yellow setting, causing their
action to seem vague and illy-defined. Augustus Thomas' "The Harvest
Moon" had a scene in which the same subject matter was repeated
successively in different settings. Unless you had witnessed this
performance, you would hardly believe how wholly unlike were the
impressions produced. Costumes and music have an equal portence, and
both call for the exercise of nice discretion.

The personality of the stage director, and his manner at rehearsal,
are vital considerations. In acting, more than in any other art, the
feeling of the artist reaches through his work. Everyone who has
watched rehearsals has come to the conclusion, at one time or another,
that actors are something less than human. As a matter of fact they
are simply children, calling for the patience, the forbearance, and
the flexibility of view-point necessary in a nursery. Wholly
self-centered, having little contact with the outside world, their
standards, their emotions, their false valuations make constant
difficulties for the man who has to play upon them as upon a piano.

The dramatic instinct and the egregious ego form a provoking blend. I
have known an actress, at a dress rehearsal, the night before the
public performance of a play, to go into violent hysterics, apparently
reduced to a nervous wreck by the strain of her work. "Great heavens!"
I have said to the director; "she won't be able to appear tomorrow."
"Acting, my boy", that gentleman would reply. "Acting for our benefit
and her own. She'll be all right in ten minutes." And in ten minutes
this same woman, done with her scene, would be advancing most logical
reasons why she should have somebody's dressing room and why somebody
else should have been given hers. I don't know exactly what
temperament is, but most actors think they have it.

Player folk are full of superstitions, and many of these relate to
rehearsal. Few actors will speak the "tag", or last line, of a play
until its premiere. If that line were spoken the play would fail.
Managers are not exempt from similar ideas, a mixture of ignorance and
experience. A good final rehearsal is supposed to forecast a bad first
performance, and this notion is not without reason, since the people,
made sure of themselves, are pretty certain to lose the tension of
nervousness. When the actors like a play at rehearsal the manager
grows fearful. An actor usually likes best the play in which he has
the best part, and that is not invariably the best play.

Small, indeed, is the share of glory that goes to "the power behind
the throne." His name adorns no bill-boards, and, on the program, you
will find it most frequently among the announcements that the shoes
came from Hammersmith's or that the wigs are by Stepner. The manager
knows the stage director, though, and respects him, reputation of this
kind being more profitable than reputation with the great, careless
public.

Some few managers, like David Belasco and Collin Kemper, attend to the
staging of their own productions, and, indeed, are most noted for
their skill in this work. Many authors, among the number Augustus
Thomas, James Forbes and Charles Klein, "put on" their own plays. Then
there are "General Stage Directors", like William Seymour or J. C.
Huffman, employed at so much per annum by big firms like those of
Charles Frohman or the Shuberts. There are also detached directors,
who contract to stage a play here or there at sums varying from five
hundred to a thousand dollars for each piece. Julian Mitchell, R. H.
Burnside and George Marion head the list of men who make a specialty
of producing musical comedy, which is a field in itself. A broad
distinction exists between the stage director and the stage manager,
the province of the latter being only to carry out the plans of the
former.

A dramatic composition is rehearsed from two to four weeks, the
rehearsals usually lasting from ten o'clock in the morning until five
in the evening, with an hour for luncheon. The play being finished
and accepted, the manager turns the manuscript over to the stage
director. This gentleman reads it carefully, realizing possibilities
and devising "business." I have known authors to write, and directors
to read, with a miniature stage beside them. On this stage, pins would
take the place of people, being moved here and there as one situation
followed another. The exact location of the characters at every speech
was then marked on the manuscript, so that little or no experimenting
was necessary at rehearsal.

After he has read the play, the director consults with the author and
the manager and the scene painter. He helps the manager decide what
actors had best be engaged, and the four determine every detail of the
settings to be built and painted. Miniatures of these settings are
afterward prepared by the artist and officially O. K.'d. The manager
interviews such people as he thinks he may utilize, and comes to terms
with them. Actors are not paid for time spent in rehearsal, and, if
they prove unsatisfactory before the initial performance, may be
dismissed without notice and without recompense.

It is an old custom, now in the way of being revived, to begin
operations by reading the play to the company. The first rehearsals
may take place in a hall, but, whenever it is possible, a stage is
brought into requisition. In the centre of the stage, directly back of
the footlights, is the prompt table, at which sit the author, the
director, and the stage manager. The players, when they are not at
work, lounge in remote corners, leaving the greater portion of the
floor space cleared for action. There is no scenery, no furniture, no
"properties." Two stools, with a space between them, may stand for
Juliet's balcony, for the Rialto Bridge, or merely for a window in a
modern apartment house. The casual observer may be puzzled at hearing
some Thespian harranguing to four vacant chairs, until it is explained
that these four chairs mark the corners of a jury box in which twelve
good men and true--same being "supers" yet to be employed--are to try
the hero for his life.

In the beginning the actors read lines from their parts. A "part"
contains the speeches and "business" of the actor for whom it is
intended, with "cues", or the last few words of each speech preceding
his, so that he may know when to speak. An extract from the "part" of
the Queen in "Hamlet" (Act III; Scene I) would look something like
this:

    (You enter L.3.E.)
    Did he receive you well?
    ----free in his reply.
    Did you assay him to any pastime?
    ----he suffers for.
    I shall obey you. Etc.

The director shows the actor where he shall stand, and where go, at
every speech, and the stage manager notes on the manuscript such
"business" as is not already written in it. Also, he sets down
memoranda for the raising and "dimming" of lights, the ringing of
bells, and other things to be done "off stage."

After a couple of days' rehearsal the players may be told that they
must have the lines of the first act committed to memory within a
certain time. "Letter perfect on Thursday!" says the director. "Don't
forget; I want to hear every 'if, 'and', and 'but' spoken on
Thursday!"

So, act by act, the piece is learned, and, within a week, "parts" are
put away, and the real work of rehearsal begins. By this time, the
"roughing out" of the production has been done, positions have been
taught, and the director begins devoting himself to details.
Throughout the first fortnight he interrupts frequently; compels the
people to go back a dozen times over this scene or that; halts, thinks
out trifles, suggests and experiments. When the rehearsals are
two-thirds done, however, he and the author break in less and less
often. They sit, notebooks in hand, jotting down their observations,
which are read aloud to the company at the end of each act.

Meanwhile, the director has attended to several important matters with
which the cast has no immediate concern. He has made out a list of
"properties", or small articles to be handled in the performance, and
has given it to the manager. This list requires care. For example, if
matches are needed in the play, it must be ascertained what kind of
matches were used at that period, and sulphur, parlor, or "safety"
matches must be specified. The manager must also be given lists of
furniture and draperies. Later on, a table of "music cues" must be
made out for the orchestra, and one of "light cues" for the
electrician. The play must be timed, so that it may be known to a
minute at what hour the curtain will rise and fall on every act.
Generally, a page of typewritten manuscript will occupy a minute, but
guess work on this point does not suffice for the director. The
players begin to consult him about their costumes, too, and he must
take into account the blending of colors, the fashions of the period,
and the personal characteristics likely to manifest themselves in
attire.

I wish I could make you see a theater during the progress of a
rehearsal. The great auditorium is dark and vacant, but for two or
three cleaners, who may be sweeping and dusting. White cloths cover
the seats, and hang over the facades of the boxes. Through the center
of the stage, just behind the footlights, a gas pipe rears itself to a
height of five or six feet, and a single jet burns at the end of it.
Close beside this pipe is the table I have mentioned, where, with
their backs to the auditorium, sit three very busy, very attentive
gentlemen. Farther on the stage, which is bare except for a couple of
tables and a few chairs, stand two or three actors, attired in street
dress, talking in a fashion utterly out of keeping with their
every-day appearance. And on all sides are little groups of men and
women, who pay no attention to the people in the scene and to whom the
people in the scene pay no attention, who laugh and chat in subdued
tones until some "cue" brings them into the action.

One day a notice appears on the call board. The company will leave
from the Grand Central Station the next morning at 7:20 o'clock. The
destination may be Syracuse, N. Y. The hotels in that city are
so-and-so. The theater is the New Wieting. There will be a dress
rehearsal there tomorrow night at 8. "Everybody will please be made up
half an hour earlier."

[Illustration: "_This is the first time the director has seen them
'made up' and he is likely to have many suggestions_"]

The dress rehearsal is the crowning ordeal in the business of
producing plays. It is the summing up of everything that has gone on
before; the concentration into one evening of all the work and nervous
strain of the past month. It is safe to say that in no other
profession is so much labor and agony crowded into a single effort.
Very often dress rehearsals last from eight o'clock at night until
eight the next morning. Sometimes they last longer. The dress
rehearsal of "The Burgomaster", at the Manhattan Theater, New York,
began at noon on Sunday and continued, without intermission, until
eleven o'clock Monday. Frequently, coffee and sandwiches are served in
one of the dressing rooms, or on the stage, and the tired players
snatch a bite or two between scenes.

The director has been in the theatre all the afternoon, superintending
the setting of scenes and the "dressing" of the stage, which means
the placing of furniture and the hanging of curtains. Half an hour
before the rehearsal begins, the members of the company come from
their rooms, one by one, for an inspection of costumes. This is the
first time the director has seen them "made up", and he is likely to
have many suggestions. This wig isn't gray enough, that beard is too
straggling, the dress over there isn't in character. Back go the
actors to remedy these defects, and after a time the rehearsal is
started.

Dress rehearsals invariably are prefaced by the managerial
announcement that there will be no interruptions, but I have never
seen an uninterrupted dress rehearsal. The leading man stops in the
middle of a love scene to inquire what he shall do with his bouquet,
or the leading woman to complain that the property man hasn't placed a
bundle of letters where it ought to be. I remember that, when we came
to the final rehearsal of "The Little Gray Lady", the manager, Maurice
Campbell, finished his remarks about interruptions, and called upon
the orchestra to begin the overture. The orchestra promptly struck
up "The Dead March from Saul", and the forbidden interruption came
on the spot.

[Illustration: "_The interruption came on the spot_"]

A dress rehearsal is supposed to be an ordinary performance without an
audience. But it isn't. There is no excitement, no enthusiasm, no
inspiration. Speeches fall flat, dialogue seems inordinately long and
wearisome, bits of "business" that have appeared all right before look
wholly different in changed surroundings. The actors, finding
themselves for the first time in the setting to be used, are utterly
lost. By-play with small articles, rehearsed twenty times, is
blundered over when the player finds the "prop" actually in his hands.
To observe the most experienced actor, and man of the world, handle a
tea cup or a card case at a dress rehearsal you would swear that he
had never seen such a thing before in his life.

And, O, the wickedness of inanimate things--doors that will not shut,
matches that cannot be lit, table drawers that positively refuse to
open! Whenever something of this sort goes wrong, the carpenter or the
property man has to be called upon, and the scene stops, to be
resumed later with a flatness commensurate with the length of the
halt. Above all other sounds rings the clarion voice of the director,
shouting to electricians, stage hands, actors. Everybody makes notes,
to be quietly gone over with the company on the morrow, just before
the actual performance.

At last, when the gray dawn is peeping in at the windows, when
everyone concerned has reached the ultimate stage of exhaustion, the
rehearsal is dismissed. The director makes a few remarks--sufficient
censure to prevent over-confidence, mixed with enough hope to give
courage. "Pretty bad", he says, "but I look for you to pull up
tonight. We'll get together for a little chat at four o'clock in the
smoking room of the theater."

Thus ends the period of rehearsal--a period of hard work, trials,
tribulations, constant nervous strain. And it may all go for nothing.
In three short hours the labor of years on the part of the author, of
months on the part of the manager, of weeks on the part of the
players, may be proved utterly worthless and without result. This,
however, depends upon the public; those concerned have done all they
know, all that can be done, not by random and haphazard work; but by
skillful following of what is at once an exact science and a variable
art. The philosophic author shrugs his shoulders as he leaves the
theater.

[Illustration: "_Matches that cannot be lit_"]

"Well?" inquires the stage director.

"Well", he replies. "We've done our best. It's on the knees of the
gods."




_THE ART OF "GETTING IT OVER"_

     Being the sort of title to suggest a treatise on suicide,
     whereas, in point of fact, this chapter merely confides all the
     author does not know about acting.


Even in a dictionary of slang, inquisitive reader, you will not find
the phrase, "getting it over." "Art has its own language," and the
language of dramatic art sometimes is fearful and wonderful to
contemplate. In this particular idiom, "it" stands for an impression
or expression, and the precise boundary that the impression or
expression "gets over" is the footlights. Do I make myself clear? As
to the art of "getting it over," that is a thing about which no two
people are likely to agree. When, on the first night of F. Ziegfeld's
"Follies of 1910," a lady named Lillian Lorraine, ensconced in a swing
and two gorgeous silk stockings, was projected into the tobacco smoke
above the third row of orchestra seats, a great many star-gazers
united in the idea that her manager had solved the problem.

[Illustration: "_A lady, ensconced in a swing and two gorgeous silk
stockings, was projected above the third row of orchestra seats_"]

Paul Potter's comedy, "The Honor of the Family," was a melancholy
failure at 8.40 o'clock on the evening of its premiere in the Hudson
Theater. At 8.42 Otis Skinner, in the character of Colonel Philippe
Bridau, his aggressive high hat tilted at an insolent angle, his
arrogant cane poking defiance, had walked past a window in the flat,
and the piece was a success. Without speaking a word, without doing
the least thing pertinent to the play, Mr. Skinner had reached out
into the auditorium and gripped the interest of sixteen hundred bored
spectators. This is so fine a demonstration of the thesis that my
article really should be advertised as "with an illustration by Otis
Skinner."

"In that instant," the rescuer said afterward, "I knew I had them."
Any actor would have known. "Getting it over," vague as the phrase may
be to a layman, is almost a physical experience to the man or woman
who accomplishes it. The thought sent out seems as material a thing
as a handball, "and," once remarked Richard Mansfield, "I can see it
go smashing past the footlights and into the brains of my auditors, or
striking an invisible wall across the proscenium arch and bouncing
back to the stage."

The ability to send the thought smashing is surprisingly separate from
the art of acting. Many schooled and skilled performers, whose names
are omitted from this chronicle because I don't want to swell the
waiting list of my enemies, have never got into an auditorium without
coming through the door back of the boxes. Knowledge may be power, but
it isn't propulsion. Nothing is more brainless than a mustard plaster,
yet it draws. George W. Lewes wrote several illuminative works on
histrionism, and we have the word of A. B. Walkley that his Shylock
made tender-hearted persons glad that Shakespeare died in the
seventeenth century.

On the other hand, there are mediocre mimes who possess the faculty of
establishing immediate communication with an audience. All of us
have applauded the chorus girl who, while endeavoring conscientiously
to put her best foot forward at the exact moment and in the precise
manner that thirty other best feet advanced, has scored a distinct
individual success. A young woman did that on the first night of Peter
Dailey's "The Press Agent" at the Hackett. She was fined $5 for it,
but another chorister, whose name is Elsie Ferguson and who attracted
attention in "The Girl From Kay's," is starring this year under
direction of Henry B. Harris.

[Illustration: "_The thought sent out seems as material a thing as a
handball. Sometimes, I can see it striking an invisible wall and
bouncing back to the stage_"]

Call it art, truth, intelligence, personality, magnetism, telepathy,
hypnotism--Edwin Stevens, in a recent interview, called it
hypnotism--or the _wanderlust_ of a personally-conducted aura, the
fact remains that there is a something by which some actors, without
visible effort, convey a distinct and emphatic impression. We have
seen John Drew step upon the stage, and, even while the applause
lingered over his entrance, shed a sense of elegance, manner and
mastery. We have responded to the charm of John Barrymore and A. E.
Matthews before they opened their mouths to speak. We have absorbed
the radiance of May Irwin's good humor, we have felt unbidden the
piquancy of Marie Tempest, we have laughed at a look from Bert
Williams, and we have been awed when William Gillette, walking on as
though there was nothing in the wind, has portentously and with
sinister purpose flicked the ashes from the tip of his cigar.

No, friends and fellow dramatic critics, this is not acting. The art
and experience of acting may go into it, but acting can not be held to
account for what happens before a man begins to act. The curtain
rising on the second act of "Such a Little Queen" discloses two girls,
a telephone operator and a stenographer, chatting obliviously while a
clerk, at the other end of the office, robs the mail. It is important
that the robbery should register, else much that follows can not be
understood. For a long time, when we were rehearsing, it seemed
impossible to get this theft over the footlights. The girls were
pretty, their dialogue was breezy, and, for catching the mind, a word
in the mouth is worth two conveyed by pantomime. Our clerk, a capable
enough young fellow, simply could not get the attention of the
audience. After he had failed to do so at several trial performances,
Frank Keenan, who was staging the play, mounted the rostrum and took
his place. Mr. Keenan did exactly what had been done by his
predecessor. His movements, like the other man's, were according to
the book; his facial expression was the same, and, of course, he did
not speak. But he held us--Heavens, how he held us! Every eye was on
him the instant the curtain lifted, and, for all the notice they got,
the girls might as well have been painted on the proscenium arch. Even
after that, the original couldn't do it. While he was robbing the
mails, we had to rob the females of every distracting line of
dialogue. Wherever Frank Keenan sits is the center of the stage.

[Illustration: "_William Gillette portentously flicked the ashes from
his cigar_"]

If you ask me--and we'll assume that you _have_ asked me--what is
responsible for this sort of an achievement, I shall answer "self." I
don't mean personality. I mean that, whether he wishes it or not, what
"gets over" isn't so often what a man thinks or desires, but what he
_is_. The same thing is true of painters and sculptors and
novelists--"For," said Walter Bagehot, "we know that authors don't
keep tame steam engines to write their books"--and how much more
likely is it to be true of the artist who is himself the expression of
his art. In the footlight trough of a burlesque theater in the Bowery,
invisible to the audience but staring the performers in the face, is
the legend: "Smile, ladies, smile!" Yet these ladies, thus,
perpetually reminded, never spread the contagion of merriment and good
humor for which a Puritan community would have quarantined Blanche
Ring. Don't tell me Miss Ring is an artist. She isn't, but she's
jolly!

The board of governors, or the house committee, or whatever it is that
directs the destinies of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau isn't far
wrong, if, as is reported, it insists upon purity in its Madonna and
beneficence in its Man of Sorrows. Imagine a woman of notoriously evil
life, or even of evil life that wasn't notorious, impersonating Sister
Beatrice in the marvelous miracle play of Maeterlinck's. A gentleman
who had driven four wives--tandem--to death or the divorce court would
have been an offense as Manson in "The Servant in the House." Mr.
Forbes-Robertson is an admirable artist, but it was his spirituality,
his asceticism that "got over" in his delightful portrayal of The
"Third Floor Back". Certainly, it isn't the frankness of lines, verbal
or anatomical, that makes the difference between a musical comedy and
a salacious "girl show." It's the intention; the character of producer
and produced.

"Robert Loraine isn't a good actor," William A. Brady said to me once,
"but he's sure to be a popular star, because of the vigor, the
virility, the fresh young manhood, the breath of outdoors that he
sends over the footlights." Consider the lilies in the cheeks of
Billie Burke, and then, if you can tear yourself away from that
floricultural exhibition, consider the box-office value of the youth
that spills itself from the lips of Wallace Eddinger and Douglas
Fairbanks. All the genius of Mrs. Fiske couldn't make an audience
believe in her motherhood in "The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch"--"I wouldn't
trust her with a baby of mine," whispered a woman in the first-night
audience at the Manhattan--but how we felt the maternalism of Jennie
Eustace in "The Witching Hour," and, in another way, of Jessie
Millward in "The Hypocrites." Hedwig Reicher is a capital actress, but
she is also a self-reliant woman, and her skill couldn't win sympathy
for her supposed helplessness in "The Next of Kin."

Two years ago I was trying terribly to make prospective audiences
sense the pitiful plight of poor little Anna Victoria in "Such a
Little Queen." I wrote a dozen lines as to the discomfort of
starvation, the inconvenience of being put into the street. They were
things that I thought, and then I remembered that, when I came to New
York with nothing but my "cheek" a woman might say under the
circumstances, I and two dollars in money, I used to look out of the
windows--the window--of my top-story room and think: "In all this
great city there isn't a human being who cares whether I live or die."
These very words I put into the mouth of Anna Victoria, and, of all my
fine speeches, that was the only one that really "got over."

It "got over" because it was true, and because, whatever else truth
may be--has any one ever satisfactorily answered Pontius Pilate?--it
is the best bullet one can shoot across the footlights. Vicarious
experience sometimes does the trick, but only for persons of highly
developed mimetic faculty. I remember a woman in a play who was
supposed to receive her death blow with an "Oh, my God!" She was
particularly requested not to scream it, or to groan it, or to do
anything else conventional with it. It was to be a helpless "Oh, my
God!", a hopeless "Oh, my God!", an "Oh, my God!" that sounded like
the thud of a hammer at the heart. One night she got the tone. "How?"
we asked. "I heard a woman say it in the street. An ambulance surgeon
had told her her baby was dead."

The first principle of "getting it over," then, is being, feeling,
believing. It is a principle that draws interest. Believing is very
important. Do you think John Mason could have held his audience
through the episode under the electrolier in "The Witching Hour" if he
hadn't believed in it? I don't. Perriton Carlyle, in "The Little Gray
Lady," made a mistake. It was a bad mistake, composed chiefly of a
hundred dollars that didn't belong to him. I never knew any one in my
life who hadn't stolen something sometime, and many of my friends are
pretty respectable now. I believed that Carlyle's foot had slipped,
and that, in spite of the accident, he might walk straight the rest of
his days. I couldn't get an actor to believe it. Edgar Selwyn didn't,
and Eugene Ormonde didn't, and, while they played the part, nobody
did. John Albaugh, Jr., an actor inferior to both of them, felt sure
of the inherent goodness of Carlyle, and so made possible the success
of a piece that could not have succeeded without universal sympathy
for its hero.

Well, we've ridden a long way astride of a hobby. Let's get back, and
admit that we like sugar on our strawberries, which is to say art with
our nature. For, after all, a generous admixture of skill is required
in the expression of instinct, just as the peach-bloomiest complexion,
displayed in the high light of the theater, must have rouge upon it to
seem what it really is. Every stage manager knows the genuine society
girl who is engaged to lend verisimilitude to a drawing-room drama,
and who, at rehearsals, regards her teacup as though it were some
strange and savage animal.

Edwin Booth's Othello was the triumph of an artist. He made audiences
forget that his embodiment of the Moor was a thin-chested, undersized
student of sensitive face and dreamy eyes. Charles Kean's first
appearance in London was as Macbeth, and his Lady Macbeth, a great
woman in both senses of the word, refused to play opposite a leading
man who "looked like a half-grown boy." Afterwards, she swore that he
grew during the performance. Salvini drawing tears from an audience
ignorant of his tongue by counting from one to an hundred; Bernhardt
scolding an actor in the death tones of Camille; Margaret Anglin
repeating "Poor little ice-cream soda" until her hearers broke down
sobbing--these are examples of pure artistry, of "getting over"
impressions without even a thought behind them. No one who knows the
first thing about the theater can underrate, be it never so slightly,
the value of training, of experience; the effectiveness of
carefully-thought-out "business", of inflection, of nuance, of pitch,
of rhythm, of all the things that require years of study, labor, and
perseverance.

Tully Marshall, whose Hannock in "The City" was the finest, and seemed
the most inspired, acting of last season, tells me that he worked
out, almost mechanically, every thrill in his big scene at the end of
Act III. Mr. Marshall made so convincing the degeneracy, the
besottedness of the character that I have heard laymen insist he must
be a drug fiend. Yet this actor knows exactly how he produced his
effects. Ethel Barrymore, on the other hand, knew only that she had
striven for years, and had never quite felt herself "go smashing past
the footlights and into the brains of her auditors."

[Illustration: "_Lady Macbeth swore that he grew during the
performance_"]

Then, on the first night in New York of John Galsworthy's "The Silver
Box," when, as Mrs. Jones, charwoman, she stepped down from the
witness stand, silent, but thinking with all the force that was in her
of the wretched, squalid home to which she was returning alone, and
the curtain fell between her and the vast stillness of the awed
audience, she knew that at last she had "got it over."

"And, oh!" says Ethel Barrymore, "I found the knowledge sweet."




_SOMETHING ABOUT "FIRST NIGHTS"_

     Wherein is shown that the opening of a new play is more
     hazardous than the opening of a jackpot, and that theatrical
     production is a game of chance in comparison with which
     roulette and rouge-et-noir are as tiddledewinks or old maid.


While the curtain was rising and falling after the third act of "Seven
Days", then being given its initial performance in New York at the
Astor Theater, a woman behind me remarked: "I'll bet Hopwood is the
happiest man in town at this moment!"

The person to whom she alluded was Avery Hopwood, collaborative author
of the play in question, and almost any auditor in the house would
have declined to take the other side of the wager. "Seven Days" was an
obvious success, an unexpected success, and a success that had arrived
something after schedule time. Mr. Hopwood had shared with your humble
servant the credit for his first work, "Clothes", and his second and
third works, "The Powers That Be" and "This Woman and This Man", had
not called the fire department to the Hudson River. Those watchful
gentlemen, the managers, who measure a dramatist by the line in front
of his box office, were beginning to wonder whether "Hopwood really
can write a play." Here was a vociferous answer to the question--an
answer destined to be repeated, with greater emphasis, a year later in
"Nobody's Widow." "Certainly", I thought, "Hopwood _is_ the happiest
man in town at this moment!"

Subsequently, on my way out of the Astor, I came within an ace of
running into "the happiest man." He was standing on the curb, half a
block north of the theater, and he didn't "look the part" with which
he had been invested. His face was white and set, his brow puckered
into deep wrinkles, and his chief occupation seemed to be the nice one
of nibbling the skin from his knuckles without actually lacerating
them. "Well", he inquired, with agonized anxiety, "how did it go?"

"A knockout!" I replied, in the vernacular.

"On the level?" he asked. "You're not trying to jolly me?"

There was no suggestion of insincerity in the query. It was evident
that Diogenes, if he had returned to look for the happiest, instead of
for an honest man, must needs have gone farther than the author of
"Seven Days."

From contact with other victims and from personal experience, I feel
qualified to say that the most terrible ordeal known since the days of
the inquisition is a theatrical "first night." Dramatist, manager,
actors and even stage hands are tortured by it, and their sufferings
are not to be gauged by the number of times they have undergone the
horror. The "first night", moreover, is a thing unique in art. A
painting may hang for weeks before the painter learns whether he has
succeeded or not; a book may be on the market nearly a year without
its author knowing the result of his effort. In either case,
criticisms are many and varying. The verdict on a play, however, is
given with the suddenness and force of a blow, and sometimes it is
equally conclusive. Failure in any other field leaves something in the
way of assets; theatrical failure sweeps away everything. Realize
this, put yourself in the place of those most concerned, and you will
understand the effect of a "first night." Suppose that all your
possessions, representing the labor of a life-time, were tied together
and suspended by a string over a bottomless abyss. The feeling with
which you would watch that string as it stretched to the breaking
point would be akin to the feeling with which the dramatist watches
the audience come to pass judgment on his work.

Of course, it is not always, or often, true that a single production
either makes or breaks those concerned in it, but even a single
production is so large an element in this making or breaking that it
becomes of vital importance. Sometimes, too, "first night" gatherings
are wrong, and performances which they condemn afterward prove great
artistic and financial hits. This, however, is rare; the say of the
initial audience, made up of professional reviewers and experienced
theater-goers, is likely to be conclusive. Henrietta Crosman, then an
unknown actress from the West, came to New York with "Mistress Nell"
on October 9, 1900, and opened to receipts under two hundred dollars.
A single day later the sums being paid into the box office were
limited only by the seating capacity of the house. Helen Ware, after
years of unrecognized good work in small parts, achieved stellar
honors within the three hours of her first metropolitan appearance as
Annie Jeffries in "The Third Degree." No chronicle short of a
six-volume book could begin to give an account of the playwrights and
players whose stock has soared a hundred points during the course of a
single evening on Broadway.

Failures determined with equal promptitude have been so numerous
during the past few seasons that it seems idle to recapitulate. One
night proved a sufficiently long time in which to guess accurately at
the future of "Septimus", "Drifting", "A Skylark", "Mr. Buttles",
"Miss Patsy", "The Heights", "The Upstart", "The Scandal", "The
Young Turk", "The Foolish Virgin", "The Next of Kin", "The Fires of
Fate", "Children of Destiny", "Welcome to Our City", and "A Little
Brother of the Rich." Two or three of these had been great triumphs in
London and Paris, half a dozen were by famous Englishmen and
Americans, nearly all represented extravagant expenditure on the part
of experienced managers, but neither precedent nor prominence
disturbed the "first night" jury in New York. Augustus Thomas' "The
Ranger" was voted impossible a few years ago at Wallack's with as
little hesitation as though it had been written by John Jones instead
of by the author of "Arizona." Frank McKee cancelled the bookings of
Hoyt's "A Dog in the Manger" while the second act was in progress at
Washington, and "The Narrow Path", offered for a run at the Hackett,
never had another performance there--or anywhere else.

[Illustration: "_A playwright whose stock has soared a hundred points
in a single evening_"]

With such possibilities as these before his eyes, with "Mrs. Dane's
Defence" at one end of the pendulum's reach and "The Evangelist" at
the other, do you wonder that the playwright is nervous on a "first
night"?

Unfortunately, it is not alone the behavior of the "death watch" in
front of the footlights that gives cause for anxiety. Actors and
actresses are uncertain creatures, while inanimate objects seem to
have a perfect genius for going wrong at critical times. No amount of
rehearsing can be depended upon to prevent a moon wobbling as it rises
at an initial performance, or to make the crash of thunder sound
unlike Bridget taking it out of the pots and pans after dinner. A
laugh at a serious moment may decide the fate of a play, the fate of a
play may make a difference of several hundred thousand dollars to its
manager, and, this being true, what the manager says to the property
man or the electrician after a _faux pas_ like either of those
mentioned is a problem you can solve in half the time you once devoted
to discovering the age of Ann.

I remember vividly the primal performance at Hartford of Paul Arthur's
melodrama, "Lost River." One of the mechanical effects in this piece
was a bicycle race, during which the contestants pedaled wildly on
stationary machines. The effect of passing landscape was given by a
panorama and a fence that moved rapidly in the opposite direction. At
least, they were supposed to move in the opposite direction, but on
the occasion of which I speak they didn't. The race became one between
the bicyclists and the surrounding country, and the surrounding
country was far in the lead when an irate stage manager rang down the
curtain. This accident never happened again, but, had the "first
night" been in New York instead of on the road, once would have been
enough.

The late A. M. Palmer used to tell a story illustrative of the fact
that players, under stress of "first night" excitement, often share
"the wickedness of inanimate things." Mr. Palmer produced "Trilby"
when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, and upon the consequences
of the performance depended his immediate future. Paul Potter's
dramatization opened in Boston, and gave no cause for worry except in
the matter of its extreme length. Half the population of Boston is
also the population of suburban towns, and Sarah Bernhardt, George
Cohan and a Yale lock couldn't keep 'em from leaving a theater at
train time. Consequently, when eleven o'clock came and the last act of
"Trilby" had just begun, a frown settled on the classic brow of the
ordinarily imperturbable Mr. Palmer.

Virginia Harned, neither as experienced nor as clever then as now, was
playing Trilby, and she felt that her portrayal had been more or less
overshadowed by the Svengali of Wilton Lackaye. There is no better
part in the drama than that of the hypnotist, while the opportunities
of the name role are limited. Miss Harned's first chance to make her
talent conspicuous came with the death of the model in the last act.
"Trilby began to die at 11:10", declared Mr. Palmer. "The audience had
already commenced looking at its watches, and a photograph of my
thoughts would have developed into a blue print. Miss Harned, on
the contrary, approached the scene with joy, too wrought up to take
into consideration the fact that the people in front had begun to be
more interested in Newton than in the affairs of Little Billee. Trilby
died in every way known to medical science and the art of acting. She
died of heart disease and consumption and cerebral spinal meningitis.
She died a la Bernhardt and Marlowe and Clara Morris. She died on the
sofa and the piano stool and two of the rugs, and, just when I thought
she had breathed her last against the door R. I. E., she found
strength to take a few steps and do it all over again in the center of
the stage. Little Billee was waiting in the wings, but, as you will
understand if you remember the play, no one could come on until Trilby
had shuffled off her mortal coil. And Trilby, on this occasion, simply
would not shuffle. It was nearly 11:30 when she finally gave up the
ghost on a davenport L. C., in the presence of that portion of the
audience sufficiently Yankee to be determined upon missing nothing it
had paid to see. That death scene, abridged and expurgated, afterward
became a most powerful and effective bit of acting, but I confess that
on the evening in question the quality of it was somewhat obscured by
the quantity."

[Illustration: "_Sarah Bernhardt, George Cohan, and a Yale lock
couldn't keep a Boston audience from leaving at train time_"]

Dramatic authors, likely to be the victims of incidents of this sort,
cannot be blamed for manifesting marked peculiarities as regards
"first nights." When my best and least successful play, "The Secret
Orchard", was given its premiere at the Lyric, I trotted off to see "A
Knight for a Day" at Wallack's. James Forbes spends his evening behind
the scenes. After the opening of "The Commuters", which ran six months
at the Criterion, he locked himself in a dressing room, convinced that
the piece was a dismal failure, and refused to come out, even when
implored to do so in order that the leading woman might get into her
street clothes. Throughout the performance of his maiden effort, "Her
Husband's Wife", "Al" Thomas walked up and down the block in front of
the Garrick. Few men are able even to assume the insouciance of Harry
B. Smith, who, at the primal presentation of his "The Bachellor
Belles", smoked a cigar in the lobby throughout the first act and went
home in the middle of the second.

[Illustration: "_Trilby died in every way known to medical science and
the art of acting_"]

Until constant ridicule broke up the practice, most authors needed
little urging to induce them to address their audiences on "first
nights." As recently as the Fall of 1909, during the performance of
"On the Eve", Martha Morton, its adapter, made a speech from her box
at the Hudson. The man behind the pen has so little chance to get into
the limelight--poor fellow!--that to speak or not to speak will always
be a mooted question with him. Either course is likely to be mistaken
by the critics, who put down the unfortunate scribe as a vainglorious
person if he appears and as a poseur if he does not. Personally, I
feel that the average author is much more favorably represented by
what he writes than by what he says, and that neither he nor the
player has any real justification for mixing his own personality with
those of the puppets he creates. It is disillusioning, after having
spent some time in witnessing stirring deeds and hearing
high-sounding words, to be confronted with a little, stoop-shouldered
man, his face white in the glare of the footlights and his hands
anxiously seeking a refuge in his ill-fiting and pocketless dress
trousers, and to realize that this grotesque figure is that of the
inventor of all the splendid beings you have seen.

New York audiences are almost the only ones in the country that ever
manifest any particular desire to gaze upon the dramatist. I heard a
man cry "Author!" once at a "first night" in Chicago, and the ushers
were about to eject him when the manager explained to them that the
enthusiast was acting with perfect propriety.

I have told you, in another part of this book, of the oratorical
talent of Augustus Thomas, who is the most impressive of
before-the-curtain monologists. He makes a fine appearance on the
stage, self-possessed and well-dressed, and his little talks
invariably are brief and witty and well-rounded. So, too, are those of
Eugene Presbrey. Paul Armstrong's undiplomatic words have been known
to prove a "last straw" on the graves of his failures, and Edith
Wharton and Charlotte Thompson, clever women both but not
prepossessing, almost turned into burlesque the "first night" of "The
Awakening of Helena Richie." Charles Klein is not big enough
physically to fill the eye, and David Belasco, with his trick of being
pushed violently to the front and of fingering his forelock, creates
an impression of insincerity and preparedness. William Gillette has
all an actor's skill in appealing to an audience, and, I am told,
saved the day--or, rather, the night--for his "Sherlock Holmes" in
London. George Ade and Sydney Rosenfeld are amusing on "the apron",
but other brilliant men, like Edwin Milton Royle and Richard Harding
Davis, are not at their best when obliged to say "thank you." Mr.
Davis figured in a neat bit of good humor in New Haven, where, after
the third act of Mr. Thomas' adaptation of his "Soldiers of Fortune",
Mr. Thomas assumed his identity and he pretended to be Mr. Thomas.

[Illustration: "_The author--as you imagine him, and as he proves to
be_"]

English playwrights are much more at ease than are American. Henry
Arthur Jones, A. W. Pinero, Henry V. Esmond, and even young Hubert
Henry Davies look well and talk well when they have occasion to "speak
out in meeting." George Bernard Shaw's witticism when somebody in the
gallery hissed while he was making a curtain speech has become famous.
The Irish Voltaire had just referred to the play of the evening, the
third act of which had been concluded, when this sound of
disapprobation cleft the circumambient atmosphere. "Ah!" said Mr. Shaw
to the disturber, "you and I are quite agreed, but we seem in the
minority."

I cannot pass by the subject of "first night" addresses without
relating to what extent Washington is indebted to me for a chatty five
minutes with Mr. Thomas on the occasion of the production of "The
Hoosier Doctor." At that time, I was dramatic critic of The Washington
Post. I was riding horseback, and, at five in the afternoon, found
myself six or eight miles from town, and in the presence of Mr.
Thomas. He had been bicycling and his machine had broken down. "Lend
me your horse, like a good fellow", he begged, when we came together.
"I want to get back for the performance of 'The Hoosier Doctor.'"

"Can't!" I replied. "I've got to write a review of that same play."

"Well", returned the author, smiling in the midst of his perplexity,
"my claim is the stronger. 'The Hoosier Doctor' can be performed
whether your criticism is written or not, but your criticism cannot be
written unless 'The Hoosier Doctor' is performed."

In the end, the public was obliged to forego neither play nor review,
since Mr. Thomas galloped to the city on my horse and I was picked up
soon after by a farmer in a wagon.

A list of the "first nights" that have gone down into histrionic
history would vie in length with a record of the bits of the true
cross on view in Europe. Primarily, one would be obliged to record
premieres at which riots have occurred, and since, at one time a
century ago, it was easier to hold an Irish election without a fight
than to give an initial dramatic performance without one, this would
take much space and research. The initial representations of great
works, such as those of Shakespeare and Moliere, and the professional
debuts of celebrated actors, like Thomas Betterton and Peg Woffington,
would baffle the descriptive powers of so humble a chronicler as
myself. Assuredly, a whole book might be written about the reception
originally accorded "Hamlet," and I am certain that we should all like
to know precisely what happened at the Boston Theater on the evening
of Monday, September 10, 1849, when Edwin Booth made his first bow to
the public. Nearly everyone remembers the interesting story of the
"first night" of "A Parisian Romance" at the Union Square Theater on
January 10, 1883, when an obscure young man named Richard Mansfield
made the minor role of Baron Chevrial the biggest part in the play and
himself the most-talked-of actor in America.

My own most notable "first night" was at Rome, some time in May,
1890, when, as a youngster, I heard "Cavalleria Rusticana" sung for
the first time on any stage. My recollection of the event is not
vivid, but I recall that the composer, Pietro Mascagni, wept, and that
the audience joined him, having already done every other emotional
thing you could call to mind. This sort of enthusiasm is not
exceptional among the Latins, and "first nights" in Madrid, Naples,
Brussells and Paris always are likely to be extremely spectacular.
Berlin, Vienna and Prague are less excitable, though I witnessed
rather a remarkable demonstration at a performance of an opera called
"Die Hexe" in the metropolis last mentioned, and saw a crowd draw home
Charlotte Wolter's carriage one evening in Vienna.

The stalls in a London playhouse hold men and women as reserved and
conservative as any in the world, but the pit, which signifies
approval by the conventional applause, has made its disapprobation
dreaded at premieres. The "boo!" of the Cockney who has paid "two and
six" for his place and is resolved upon getting his money's worth or
knowing the reason why is a potent damper. Disorder in the pit may not
even have been caused by the poorness of a production; persistent
enthusiasm on the part of a claque or the appearance of a foreign star
often provoke it. I shall never forget how near several patriotic
Americans, myself among them, were to provoking a riot against Nat
Goodwin at the opening of "The Cowboy and the Lady" in the Duke of
York's Theater.

New York, which never commits itself with a "Boo!" or a "Bis!", which
never hisses and somewhat rarely applauds, provides the most terrible
ordeal in the world for author, actor and manager. The "first nighter"
is as much a type here as in London. A small percentage of him are the
tired and idle rich, the majority being made up of wine agents,
bookmakers, professional "dead-heads", ladies of uneasy virtue, and
dramatic critics. Of an opening audience at Weber & Fields' it was
said once that "there wasn't a woman in the house who hadn't changed
her hair and her husband within the year."

These boulevardiers have seen everything produced in town during a
decade, or perhaps two decades, and are absolutely pleasure-proof.
Their attitude expresses the defiance: "I _dare_ you to satisfy me."
One of their number, asked as to the fate of a comedy, is reported to
have replied: "I'm afraid it's a success." If it were only that these
people knew everything, and were hard to please, nobody would have the
right to object to them. The trouble is that they are pleased with the
wrong fare. Witty lines and subtle construction, delicate sentiment
and simple sincerity, except for their appeal to the reviewers, must
wait for recognition until the second night. Legs and lingerie,
_double entendre_ and bald suggestion, the wit of the slap stick and
the melody of the street piano are the chosen diet of this "death
watch", which "sits in solemn silence", with impassive faces and row
after row of masculine shirt bosoms rearing themselves in the darkness
like tombstones in a pauper graveyard.

How to avoid this chilling influence is a puzzle that has agitated
every producer on Broadway. Your New York manager has a list of the
seats regularly occupied by the critics, and these go out first. Then
the wine agents and book-makers aforesaid buy the tickets laid aside
for them. Next the general public has an opportunity, of which it is
slow to take advantage, and then whatever has been left is given away.
Nobody ever saw a small "first night" audience in Manhattan, nor one
in which there were not at least three hundred enthusiastic persons.
This enthusiasm deceives no one--least of all the newspaper men for
whom is it intended--and it rebounds like a ball against the hardness
of the general imperturbability. Many a time, while the gallant three
hundred were splitting their gloves and callousing their hands, I have
seen traveling from critic to critic that glance of understanding and
disapproval which has sealed the fate of so many thousand plays.

The New York critics are about a score in number, and, during the past
few years, there have been many changes in the corps. Its dean,
William Winter, resigned from The Tribune, where his post is filled by
Arthur Warren. Alan Dale, of The American, continues to be the most
widely known of our writers on theatrical topics, and we still have
with us, as stand-bys, Adolph Klauber, of The Times; Louis De Foe, of
The World; Rennold Wolf, of The Telegraph; Acton Davies, of The
Evening Sun; Charles Darnton, of The Evening World; Rankin Towse, of
The Post, and Robert Gilbert Welsh, of The Evening Telegram. The Press
has been carrying on a lively theatrical war, and, perhaps for that
reason, its reviews manifest not only ignorance but the most bumptious
disregard of general and expert opinion. Arthur Brisbane having
declared against "abuse", The Evening Journal finds good in
everything; The Sun has had no regular critic since it lost Walter
Prichard Eaton, and The Herald boasts that it prints only "reports"
of performances. "First nights" are arranged, when that is possible,
on different evenings, so that all the critics may be present at each,
but, when there is a conflict, every man picks out the opening he
considers most important and either lets the others go until later in
the week or sends his assistant.

There are thirty or forty reviewers who represent magazines and
periodicals, but, for the most part, these are _de classe_. They flock
alone in the lobbies during intermissions, when the men from the daily
newspapers congregate in groups to exchange a word or two about the
play and to discuss other matters of common interest. These foyer
gatherings pronounce a verdict that, as we have seen, is
seldom--perhaps too seldom--overruled. Many a manager has leaned
against his box office after the third act of a new piece,
eavesdropping to learn what intelligence, experience, keen judgment
and careful reading and rehearsing have not told him.

For there are two "anxious seats" on a "first night" in New York: One
in the author's box and one in the manager's.




_IN VAUDEVILLE_

     Being inside information regarding a kind of entertainment at
     which one requires intelligence no more than the kitchen range.


Variety is the spice of life. So is vaudeville. If you doubt it,
consider Gertrude Hoffmann, Valeska Suratt, Eva Tanguay, and other
beauties unadorned of "the two a day."

Time was when "continuous performances" offered the best means of
convincing Aunt Jane that there were harmless theatrical
entertainments besides "The Old Homestead." Variety, of course, had
been a word to excite horror. But vaudeville--well, vaudeville was to
variety what "darn" is to "damn!"

And, as the advertisements have it, there was a reason. B. F. Keith,
when he took the curse off a type of amusement generally associated
with dance halls, "stag" houses, minstrel shows and "The Black Crook",
had his eye on Aunt Jane. Vaudeville, born in France during the
Fifteenth Century, and named after Les Vaux de Vire, the home of its
father, Oliver Basselin, stood for something just a little more ribald
than variety. Mr. Keith resolved to stand for nothing of the kind.
Beginning in Boston, he soon invaded Philadelphia and New York with
shows so religiously expurgated that they couldn't have drawn the
slightest protest from a Presbyterian Synod.

Oaths might not be spoken at Keith's. Betighted damsels were banned
and barred--forbidden fair. Short skirts were permitted under certain
rigorous restrictions. One of the restrictions was that ladies who
wore short skirts must not wear silk stockings. I remember wondering
wherein the silk worm was more immoral than the cotton-gin, and
concluding that, despite the phrase "ugly as sin", Mr. Keith had
defined sin as anything attractive.

Virtue and vaudeville were synonymous for something over a decade. I
don't know precisely when people stopped going to hear the new
ditties, and began going to see the nudities. "Living pictures" began
it. "Living pictures", you may recollect, were ladies in pink union
suits. They were supposed to be popular because of artistic draping
and grouping, but the minimum of drapery always brought about the
maximum of popularity. It was but a step from union suits to non-union
suits; from fleshings to whitewash and bronze varnish. In 1906 London
went quite mad over a Venus whose entire wardrobe was applied with a
paintbrush. Eventually Venus rose from the sea in America, but, by the
date of her arrival, our own performers had so far outstripped her
that she didn't create even a mild sensation.

Koster & Bials' had paved the way with Charmion, who disrobed while
seated upon a flying trapeze. Oscar Hammerstein had done some
astonishing things at his Victoria Theater. Salome, driven out of the
Metropolitan Opera House, had taken refuge in vaudeville, garbed--if
one may use the word in connection with a costume somewhat less
extensive than a porus plaster--in a fashion that made it easy to
understand why John the Baptist lost his head. Maud Allen, in England,
and Ruth St. Denis, in the United States, were reconciling the
authorities to the nude in art, and making possible any sort of
display that had dancing or diving as an excuse. Annette Kellarman,
attired in a bathing suit that clung to her like a poor relation,
wakened wonderful interest in aquatic sports, while Lala Selbini
showed herself to be of the opinion that clothing was inconsistent
with good juggling, and a female person whose name escapes me
demonstrated that bare legs were a great help in playing the violin.

[Illustration: "_Venus rose from the sea_" (_With apologies to
Botticelli_)]

The Princess Rajah, an "Oriental" dancer who had attracted attention
at Huber's Museum, journeyed to Broadway, where an excuse for her
undress, and her wrigglings, was found in the faint pretence that she
impersonated Cleopatra. "Placing a snake in her bosom", read a note on
the program, "she danced before a statue of Antony until it bit her."
Remarkable as this behavior may seem on the part of a Roman General,
it was not wholly incomprehensible to theatre-goers who witnessed the
antics of Cleopatra. According to Rajah, the Queen of Egypt
demonstrated her sorrow chiefly by seizing a kitchen chair and
whirling round and round with it in her teeth.

Of the degeneration of vaudeville the most regrettable feature is that
it has brought about no change in the character of vaudeville
audiences. Perhaps I should say in their personnel, since their
character _must_ have been affected by all this tawdry bawdry and
sensationalism. True, one or two of the down-town theaters have become
noted for the "sporty" aspect of their audiences, and, necessarily,
all these houses have lost the patronage of women shoppers, country
people and stay-at-homes that once were so assiduously courted.
Mostly, however, the crowds that flock to such performances are made
up of young girls, shop assistants, and respectable middle-class folk
who look and listen unblushingly at sights and to sentences they would
not tolerate in their own circles. It does not seem possible that
this sort of thing can be without its influence upon their lives.

[Illustration: "_Danced before a statue of Antony until it bit her_"]

When vaudeville was written down as "spice", however, I had in mind
not so much its offences against propriety as its appeal to palates
that would reject solid food. Vaudeville addresses itself to amusement
seekers incapable of giving, or unwilling to give, concentrated and
continuous attention. This kind of entertainment calls for orderliness
of mind no more than does the newspaper headline. There is no sequence
of thought to be preserved, no logical procession of ideas to be kept
in line; the impression of the moment is sufficient and supreme.
Naturally, such a performance is attractive to undisciplined brains,
to empty brains, and to lazy brains. You need bring to a vaudeville
theater nothing but the price of admission.... It is this same asking
little that has made the popularity of moving pictures.

Vaudeville has about the same relation to the "theatrical business"
that insurance bears to other business. When a business man has
failed at everything else he tries selling insurance; when a
prominent actor has "closed" twice or three times in rapid succession
he "goes into vaudeville." The better element is infused without
fusing. The regulars are inclined to look askance at these volunteers,
resenting the fact that the latter use as a make-shift what _they_
have adopted as a profession, and insisting, often not without
justice, that, "while big names may draw the crowds, it is our work
that holds 'em." I'm afraid the attitude of many recruits does not
tend to lessen this friction. "Is there a 'star dressing room?'" a
well-known prima donna inquired loftily as she entered the theater
where she was to make her debut in "the two a day."

The juggler to whom the question was put, replied: "Yes ... for
falling stars!"

However, many of these "falling stars" perform the strange
astronomical feat of climbing back into the heavens. A very large
number of the men and women at present heading their own companies
have descended into vaudeville, as Antaeus occasionally descended
to earth, to renew their strength. One attractive play and Mr. V.
Headliner becomes Mr. Broadway Star. Robert Hilliard had been in the
varieties for years when he was restored to "the legitimate" by Porter
Emerson Browne's "A Fool There Was." Sarah Bernhardt, as everybody
knows, appeared at a music hall in London _en route_ to fill her
latest engagement in America. Here we have no "Divine Sarah", but
vaudeville has sung its siren-song successfully to Mrs. Patrick
Campbell, Lily Langtry, Charles Hawtrey, Henrietta Crosman, Henry
Miller, Arnold Daly, Lillian Russell, and numberless other mimes of
great reputation. This song is most aggravating to producers of
musical comedy, whose performers, when the librettist insists upon the
preservation of some of his text or when their names do not appear in
sufficiently large type on the program, always are ready to "go into
vaudeville."

[Illustration: "_You need bring to a vaudeville theatre nothing but
the price of admission_"]

A list of people at present offering one-act plays discloses no fewer
than twenty actors and actresses of recognized ability. There is
Marietta Olly, who did capital work in "The Whirlwind" at Daly's, and
Nat C. Goodwin, who, truth to tell, draws a big salary less because of
his histrionic than because of his matrimonial versatility. Frank
Keenan, Edward Ables, and Maclyn Arbuckle, who has made a hit in
Robert Davis' clever comedietta, "The Welcher", have been stars within
the twelvemonth and are now in vaudeville, as are also Amelia Bingham,
W. H. Thompson, Charles Richman, William Courtleigh, George Beban,
Lionel Barrymore, McKee Rankin, Edwin Arden, Sam Chip and Mary Marble.
Vaudeville produces its own luminaries, too--Cissie Loftus, for
example, and Elsie Janis, who "did a specialty" for years before she
was taken up by Charles Dillingham.

Many of the cleverest entertainers in the world are identified
exclusively with the varieties. There are Yvette Guilbert, Albert
Chevalier, Harry Lauder, and Alice Lloyd, each of whom has a following
as large and appreciative as that of Maude Adams or John Drew. Other
players, less widely known, go round the circuits year after year,
making themselves solid with a class of theater-goers that has come to
depend upon them for half an hour of amusement. Cressy and Dayne are
among these, as are Mr. and Mrs. Perkins D. Fisher, Clayton White,
Carrie de Mar, Irene Franklin and Tom Nawn. George Cohan's career
began in vaudeville, and no one who has owed twenty minutes of
laughter to his ability as a racounteur will ever forget the late Ezra
Kendal. Such men as Jesse Lasky and Joseph Hart, recognizing the
opportunities of "the two a day", have made elaborate productions of
what really are little musical comedies, and have presented them as
part of regular variety bills. Mr. Lasky's "The Love Waltz" and "At
the Country Club" were as pretentiously staged as any single act in a
comic opera.

It is not my desire or disposition to deny the cleverness of these
people or the attractiveness of their "turns." I doubt that today the
most wearied theater-goer could find a vaudeville bill without one or
two numbers that would entertain him. The point is that this
amusement-seeker would be obliged to take a vast quantity of chaff
with his wheat, to review an endless procession of clog dancers, trick
bicyclists, wire walkers, trained animals, tramp comedians, acrobats
and equilibrists before coming to that part of the program which might
interest him. Most of these fillers-in are notable chiefly for the
awe-inspiring quality of their English, and for their persistence in
performing dangerous feats that, when performed, add nothing to the
sum total of human happiness, knowledge or pleasure. I haven't been
able to discover why anybody should want to see a lion stand on its
head, or a gentleman tie his legs in a true lovers' knot, and I shall
never understand the public _penchant_ for hearing "The Anvil Chorus"
played on tin cans, since it can be played so much better on a piano.
One always thinks of the wit who, being informed enthusiastically that
some stunt or other was "very difficult", replied: "I wish it were
impossible."

The worst of the matter is that, there being comparatively few
performers of merit, the same people, doing the same things, return
again and again to the same theaters. I remember having seen one team
of comedy acrobats, Rice and Prevost, seven times in the space of a
single season, at the end of which period I had ceased to laugh
uproariously when one of the two humorists fell from a table and
struck his face violently upon the floor. Half the "turns" at the
Victoria this Saturday may be at the Colonial next Monday, so that,
unless you wish your entertainment, like your wine, well-aged, you
would do well to make your vaudeville excursions to one theater. It is
too much to expect the average variety performer to change his act
more often than once in a decade, and then he is likely to retain
everything that has been especially well received. Of course, you
remember George Ade's friends, Zoroaster and Zendavesta, who, at the
end of five years, substituted green whiskers for red, and advertised:
"Everything New."

The managers certainly are doing their best to be rid of Zoroasters
and Zendavestas. Their agents search every capital of Europe for new
talent, and no one makes a hit in the music halls of London or Paris
or Berlin without immediately receiving an offer to come to America.
Nor is there any limit to the figures mentioned in such an offer. The
salaries paid, both for imported and for native talent, were supposed
to have reached their utmost height in the palmy days of Keith and
Proctor, but they have doubled since Oscar Hammerstein announced on
his billboards that he was paying $1,000 a week to Marie Dressler.
There are half a dozen performers now who get $2,000, and one or two
who are reputed to receive even more. Any number of headliners earn
five hundred dollars, or seven hundred and fifty dollars, which, you
must remember, probably is in excess of the amount tucked into the
yellow envelopes of Otis Skinner or Ethel Barrymore.

There is one important difference between the salaries paid in
vaudeville and those paid "legitimate" players. The former cannot
consider their earnings as "net", since they are obliged frequently to
engage small companies, sometimes numbering twelve or sixteen people,
whose wages come out of the sum given their principal. Variety
performers defray their own travelling expenses, too, and those of
their assistants, together with such other expenses as agents' fees,
advertising bills, and similar incidentals. Formerly a great deal of
time was lost in long jumps, and between engagements, but managerial
combinations have considerably lessened this waste. The successful
vaudevillian rarely experiences a break in his bookings now-a-days,
and, especially if his act does not depend upon acoustics, he fills
out his season with roof gardens, summer parks, and perhaps a circus.

[Illustration: "_Their agents search every capital of Europe_"]

Variety people make up an individual nation in the theatrical world.
They have their own language, their own view-point, their own
ambitions and grievances, besides their own clubs, hotels and
newspapers. The most important of these societies are The Vaudeville
Comedy Club, which has rooms in Forty-sixth Street and gives an
annual benefit, and The White Rats, an aggressive organization that
has conducted spunky fights against greedy agents and the blacklist of
the United Booking Offices. The White Rats publish a weekly
periodical, yclept The Player, but the real trade paper of the
profession is issued in a green cover and called Variety.

The vaudeville performer--he insists upon alluding to himself as "the
artist"--actually appears on the stage about forty minutes a day. His
labor, however, is not quite so light as these figures make it seem.
He must put on and take off his makeup afternoon and evening, and he
must be in the theater during a good deal of the time that he is not
engaged. Monday morning he rehearses with the orchestra, and is
assigned a number on the program of the week--vaudevillians, like
convicts and hotel guests, being identified by numbers. His place in
the bill depends upon the length of his "turn", the stage room
required for it, and its nature. Acts that can be given in front of a
drop "in one" must be sandwiched between "full stage" acts, so that
scenes may be set for the latter without interrupting the performance,
and the experienced stage manager arranges his material with a keen
eye to variety.

As important as the star dressing room to a leading woman, as vital as
full-faced type to a star is his place on the bill to a vaudevillian.
By their numbers ye shall know them. Headliners are given a position
midway in the entertainment, and insist upon it as "legitimate" actors
upon the center of the stage. Minor acts open or close a show, and the
prejudice against being assigned to either end is so great that many
stage managers must sympathize with the Irishman who, being informed
that a large per centage of the victims of railway accidents are
passengers in the last car of the train, inquired: "Then, bedad, why
don't they leave off the last car?"

A layman may ask reasonably how the managers of variety houses are
able to pay double the salaries that prevail in other theaters, while
they exact only half the price of admission. The explanation is
simple. In the first place, as has been explained, they pay _nothing
but_ salaries--neither railway fares nor the cost of costumes and
paraphernalia. They are not compelled to make big and expensive
productions, to remunerate authors, or, most important of all, to
split returns with the managers of theaters in which their shows are
given. Henry B. Harris, or Frederic Thompson, presenting "The Country
Boy" or "The Spendthrift" at the Chestnut Street Opera House,
Philadelphia, or the National Theater, Washington, must divide
equally, or nearly equally, with the lessees of those places of
amusement. The vaudeville impressario assembles his own show in his
own theater, and takes the entire amount paid in at the box office.
Even in these times, an exceedingly good bill can be put together for
$3,000, and, if the running expenses of the theatre are $2,000, there
remains a wide margin of profit.

The United Booking Offices, which do business at 1495 Broadway, is as
complete a trust as any in America. The "offices" are maintained by a
combination that includes all the powerful vaudeville managers, and
all the big vaudeville circuits, from New York to San Francisco. There
has been sporadic opposition, like that recently made by William
Morris, who had the American and Plaza Music Halls in New York and a
few others throughout the country, but the end of this opposition
always has been compromise or defeat. Performers claim that they are
not permitted to play for rival managements under pain of being placed
on the dread "blacklist", and that, once so placed, they may as well
retire from the business. Whether this be true or not--it probably is
true--and however highhanded the conduct of the combination, the
observer must concede that business-like system, economical methods
and complete order have been established by the United Booking
Offices.

This combination includes the Hammersteins, father and son, who have
the Victoria Theater in New York; Percy Williams, who controls the
Colonial, the Alhambra, the Bronx, and two theaters in Brooklyn; B. F.
Keith, who operates theaters in the metropolis, in Boston, in
Philadelphia, and in Providence; and the heads of great circuits like
the Orpheum, and Sullivan and Considine's. There are eight handsome
vaudeville theaters on Manhattan Island, not counting the burlesque
houses and the places at which moving pictures form a large part of
the bill, and it is easy to estimate that, if each of these holds
fifteen hundred persons at a performance, twenty-four thousand men,
women and children witness a variety entertainment every week in New
York. This estimate does not include the "sacred concerts", which, in
spite of clerical and legal opposition, continue to flourish. On the
Sabbath, apparently, the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts
of song and dance, and every vaudeville theater in town runs full
blast on Sunday.

However bitterly their success may be resented, it is to the
newcomers, to the recruits from the "legitimate", that vaudeville
owes its steady advancement. One may sympathize with the acrobat who,
after a life time spent in acquiring proficiency in his specialty,
sees the big salaries being paid to men who devoted a week to
rehearsing some sketch, and who couldn't turn a handspring to save
their souls. The fact remains that vaudeville's claim to the
consideration of intelligent people rests largely upon these tabloid
comedies and dramas. The vogue of such clever little plays as "At the
Telephone", "The Man From the Sea", "Circumstantial Evidence", "In Old
Edam", "When Pat Was King", "The Welcher" and "The Flag
Station"--which, by the way, was written by Eugene Walter, author of
"The Easiest Way"--marks a step forward in the possibilities of "the
two a day." It enables such men as Will Cressy, whose whole output has
been of sketches, to venture upon higher ground, and it banishes more
surely the mixture of buffoonery and maudlin sentiment that formerly
passed as playlets.

The progress made in this sort of entertainment is indicated by the
unequivocal success of Frank Keenan in "The Oath", an intense little
tragedy, founded upon a theme used by Lope de Vega. Only ten years ago
this same Frank Keenan suffered complete lack of appreciation of his
fine work in an adaptation of Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and
Professor Feather." Many well-made sketches, logically planned and
skillfully written, still owe their presence in vaudeville wholly to
the reputation of their stars. "The Walsingham", as Walsingham Potts
used to say in Madison Morton's farce of "A Regular Fix", "is a sort
of guava jelly in which you swallow the bitter pill, Potts." Other one
act dramas of great merit fail altogether.

London successes like "The Monkey's Paw", and Paris successes, like
"The Submarine" and "After the Opera", have ended miserably in New
York. Such authors as Clyde Fitch have seen their work retired after a
fortnight's trial. Two tabloid pieces, "Dope" and "By-Products", from
the pen of Joseph Medill Patterson, author of "The Fourth Estate",
after scoring triumphs of esteem in Chicago, have not been given
bookings in the East. It is not yet true that any three one-act plays
in vaudeville, if given continuity and put together, would make a
passable three act play, but there are optimists among us who feel
that that time will come. We believe that, without being less
entertaining, less diversified, or less easily enjoyed, vaudeville
will come to be made up of fewer "Jewish" or "Irish" comedians, fewer
"sister acts", fewer trained seals, and a greater number of people who
have something really clever to offer in song or speech or
impersonation.

The place of the tabloid drama is secure, since it bears the same
relation to the ordinary drama that the short story does to the novel.
One day we shall have a Theatre Antoine or a Theatre des Capucines in
New York. The popularity of the short play, with all its opportunities
for skillful construction and good acting, will follow as the night
the day. The nudities and lewdities of last year and this are but a
passing phase. Whatever vaudeville was in the past, or is in the
present, it offers endless promise for the future.




_WITH THE PEOPLE "IN STOCK"_

     Concerning Camille, ice cream, spirituality, red silk tights,
     Blanche Bates, Thomas Betterton, second-hand plays,
     parochialism, matinee girls, Augustin Daly, and other
     interesting topics.


"Why is a resident theatrical organization known as a _stock_
company?" Blanche Bates repeated after me one afternoon when she was
playing in "The Dancing Girl" at the Columbia Theater, Washington.
"Simply because the people in it work like horses."

Miss Bates, whose name at that time probably was as unfamiliar to
David Belasco as any word in Arabic, knew whereof she spoke. She had
been for several seasons with T. Daniel Frawley in San Francisco, she
had had four roles and a row with Augustin Daly inside of two months
in New York, and finally she had cast her lot with a combination that
was whiling away the summer months by producing a new piece every
week in the hottest city in America. After a little time I'm going to
tell you just what labor is involved in producing a new--or, rather, a
different--piece every week. For the present, suffice it to say that
Miss Bates' witticism was founded on a whimsical view of facts, and
that the modern stock company is exclusively responsible for the
existence of that amazing anomaly, a hard-working actor.

Most actors are kept fairly busy three weeks each year, that period
being devoted to rehearsing the one play in which they appear during
the course of a season. Throughout the remainder of eight months they
are actually occupied about four hours per diem, and at the end of
these eight months they count on having four months for rest,
recreation and relaxation. This is not at all true of the man or woman
"in stock", who, in the language of the street, "is on the job"
twenty-four hours a day and, when there is special need of exertion,
gets up an hour earlier in the morning to make it twenty-five.

The great bulk of New York theater-goers, with the parochialism
that characterizes them, know practically nothing about stock
companies. Perhaps, the chief reason of this is that within the memory
of man they never have had fewer than five at one time. Stock
companies in Philadelphia or Boston they might have studied at long
distance as curious institutions, but never stock companies so
unappealingly near as Fifty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue. Your
blithe Broadwayite leaves such places of amusement to the people in
their neighborhood, and sticks to musical comedy in the vicinity of
Times Square.

[Illustration: "_Known as a stock company ... because the people in it
work like horses_"]

Broadway used to keep close track of stock companies when the two
Frohmans had fine organizations at the old Lyceum and at the
Empire--when John Drew and Henry Miller and Georgia Cayvan were seen
in such new pieces as "The Grey Mare" and "The Charity Ball." Fifth
Avenue is beginning to re-make an acquaintance with the scheme of
resident organizations, through the medium of that at the New Theatre,
and Charles Frohman recently has announced his intention of
establishing an important stock company under the directorship of
William Gillette. This announcement brings with it high hopes; the
very suggestion calls to mind the departed glories, not only of the
Empire and the Lyceum, but of the Union Square, Daly's, and the
Madison Square.

The stock company with which we have become familiar of late has been
a very different kind of affair. Its field has been limited, and the
purpose of its managers merely the giving of old plays at popular
prices. If you have been in the world long enough to learn that
whatever is cheap in price is cheap in quality--that no merchant
deliberately sells at a loss--you will have little difficulty in
understanding that, with rare exceptions, the performances offered
have been mediocre. Sixteen, eighteen or twenty fairly competent
actors and actresses are formed into a cast that prepares a different
play every week in its season. The plays generally have had their day
in the hands of regular traveling organizations. It is not often that
the result has in it more than three letters from the word
"artistic." Such aggregations have held forth in Gotham at various
times on the stages of the American, the Fifty-eighth Street, the One
Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, the Yorkville, the Fifth Avenue, the
Murray Hill, the West End, the Plaza, and other theaters. They used to
be particularly indigenous to that portion of our metropolitan soil
known as Harlem, but now are confined almost entirely to Brooklyn.

This brand of stock company, which we may as well label "The
Contemporary Brand", had its origin in some large Eastern city where
an enterprising theatrical manager planned to provide summer amusement
for such of his patrons as wanted to stay in town through the hot
weather--and for the husbands of those who didn't. The traveling
troupes had all shut up for a few months, so this manager was obliged
to form an organization of his own. I'll bet that, at the same time,
he originated the story about installing a pipe system for
distributing cool air throughout his house--a pleasant little
Christian Science lie that since has become classic. However that may
be, the venture paid. Imitation is called initiative in the theatrical
business, and the following year there were fifty "summer stock
companies." Then somebody discovered that these combinations, playing
at low prices, had attracted a _clientele_ of their own, that they
drew people whose purses would not permit their visiting the best
theaters, and whose taste stood between them and the other houses. So
somebody else tried running a stock company all through the season,
and succeeded. Within a little time there were enterprises of this
sort in most cities of the size of Pittsburg or Cincinnati; then they
crept into towns like Hartford and Providence; now-a-days any village
populous enough to boast of two saloons, a church and a dry goods
store has also its opera house and its stock company.

In the big cities these aggregations of histrionic talent generally
offer a fresh play every week; in some of the smaller places two are
given in the course of seven days. One play a week is the usual thing,
however, and the amount of labor it involves is stupendous. Not only
must that one play be prepared in the time mentioned, but
simultaneously the company must be thinking of and acting another
play--that already being performed for the benefit of the public. Dr.
Doran, in his "Annals of the Stage", speaks of the hard work
accomplished by actors in the Eighteenth Century, when Thomas
Betterton "created a number of parts never equaled by any subsequent
actor--namely, one hundred and thirty." The good doctor, who waxes
quite enthusiastic over Betterton, adds: "In some single seasons he
studied and represented no less than eight original parts--an amount
of labor that would shake the nerves of the stoutest among us now."
Dr. Doran's esteemed friend, Master Betterton, probably would have had
his own nerves a good deal shaken had he found himself in this year of
our Lord 1911--say at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.

Victory Bateman, a charming actress whose health recently was reported
to be seriously affected by the strain of the work she had done in
stock companies, played twenty leading roles in five months. Of these
and the number of words in each she gives the following account in a
book she wrote in collaboration with Ada Patterson:

    Mrs. Winthrop in "Young Mrs. Winthrop"       7,000

    Floradilla in "A Fool's Revenge"             6,750

    Louise in "The Two Orphans"                  7,250

    Cecile in "David Laroque"                    6,500

    Adrienne in "A Celebrated Case"              7,000

    Camille in "Camille"                         7,300

    Carmen in "Carmen"                           7,200

    Portia in "Julius Caesar"                    6,500

    Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"                 7,500

    Ruth in "The Wages of Sin"                   6,000

    Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet"                 7,500

    Dora in "Diplomacy"                          6,900

    Portia in "The Merchant of Venice"           7,600

    Ophelia in "Hamlet"                          7,000

    Mrs. Gregory Graxin in "The Tragedy"      6,500

    Desdemona in "Othello"                    7,000

    Alice in "In Spite of All"                7,500

    Frou-Frou in "Frou-Frou"                  7,000

    Vera in "Moths"                           6,000

    Roxane in "Cyrano"                        8,000
                                            -------
        Total                               140,000 words

[Illustration: "_Master Betterton would have had his nerves a good
deal shaken_"]

Some of the details of this statement strike me as being erroneous. I
do not believe, for example, that Roxane is a longer part than Juliet.
One thing I do not doubt--that the average stock leading woman learns
140,000 words in a season. And 140,000 words, we must understand, are
the number contained in two fair-sized novels or "fourteen pages of a
large newspaper."

The mere statement that so much matter has to be committed to memory
does not give a fair idea of the amount of work that has to be
accomplished by the actor or the actress--especially the
actress--under these conditions. In addition to learning each role she
must rehearse it. These rehearsals will occupy every morning of the
six days whose afternoons and evenings are devoted to the public
performance of another part. In addition, the actress must figure on
giving time to dressmakers, since each character must be properly
costumed; to wig makers and to allegedly unavoidable social duties.
The inevitable result is a crudity and carelessness in the
interpretation of plays that would not be tolerated by any
theater-goers in the world except those that do tolerate it. This can
be better understood when one learns that the average time spent in
the preparation of a piece to run in New York is something like three
weeks--three weeks in which the players have nothing else to occupy
their minds.

The members of the ordinary stock company scarcely pretend to know
their lines before the third repetition of the comedy or drama in
hand. John Findlay, a fine old actor, used to complain to me that
always he "had just begun to understand what a piece was about when
they took it off and put on another." I remember an amusing incident
in connection with a rendering of a certain light comedy by a stock
company in Baltimore. A scene in this comedy was divided between two
men, one of them seated at a desk and the other standing before that
article of furniture with his hat in his hand. Both actors having
forseen opportunities of concealing their manuscripts where they could
see them and the audience could not, neither had learned a single word
of the dialogue. The first player had his part on the desk; the second
hid it in his hat. But the second man had forgotten that, at a
critical moment, the office boy was supposed to take that hat. The
moment arrived, the boy took the hat, and the unlucky Thespian, at his
wits' end, could think of nothing better to do than read the remainder
of his speeches over the shoulder of his colleague.

[Illustration: "_The actress must figure on giving time to
dressmakers_"]

Opening nights with stock companies would be dreadful affairs, but for
that kindly provision of Fate, "the old stock actor." There usually
are three or four of this man and woman in an organization, and each
of the three or four, at one time or another, has played nearly every
part known to his or her "line of business." Your "old stock actor",
who need not be old as to years, will be familiar with half the roles
entrusted to him or her in a season, so that a little study serves to
prompt recollection of the lines, and even such memory of details as
may be of great assistance when communicated to the stage director.

Unfortunately, scenery and other accessories cannot share this
advantage. The small town stock company possesses eight or ten regular
settings and a scene painter, whose efforts usually are confined to
retouching shabby spots on the canvas and to coloring furniture,
cannon, trees and similar trifles. Occasionally he paints new wall
paper and pictures, which, with the blessed aid of the stage
carpenter, who can change windows from left to right and doors from
right to left, transform the banquet hall of some Roman noble (Period
40 B. C.) to the front room of a Harlem apartment (Period 1911 A. D.)
A week doesn't allow much time for accuracy, and mine eyes have seen
the tent of Mark Antony electric lighted, Louis XVI chairs in the
palace of Macbeth, and a Queen Ann cottage occupied by Shylock and his
daughter Jessica.

When melo-drama is produced worse horrors than this are likely to
intrude themselves upon first nights. Balky locomotives _will_ refuse
to run over prostrate heroines, and I once witnessed a _premier_
matinee of "The Gunner's Mate" at which the jib boom displayed a most
distressing _penchant_ for knocking off the helmet of the ship's
Captain. Stage management frequently is responsible for even worse
blunders.

The theater-goers who frequent the homes of stock companies--they are,
for the most part, wives of sign painters and journeyman
printers--don't seem to mind things of this sort in the least. Early
in the season they begin to pick favorites in the organization, and
they follow the annual progress of such play-acting pilgrims with
great care. The value of a man or woman to his or her stock company
depends largely upon his or her personal following, and I have known
leading men to be so sure of this following that, upon being
dismissed, they have harangued crowds on the street in front of their
theaters. This very episode, by the way, occurred only a few years ago
in New York.

Matinee idols achieve popularity, not according to their own deserts,
but according to the heroism of the folk they impersonate in the
course of a season. It might be estimated safely that one opportunity
at Sydney Carton, one at Armand Duval, and one at Romeo would
establish the least prepossessing of leading men in the marshmallowy
affections of the stock company matinee girl. These young women and
their neighbors have singularly distorted ideas of good acting, and
their partizanship makes them blind to the imperfections of their
favorite players. In Brooklyn it used to be a common thing to hear
that Cecil Spooner was much better than Mrs. Leslie Carter as Zaza,
and a little time ago Pittsburg did not hesitate to put Sarah Truax
above Mrs. Fiske for her impersonation of Nora.

The manager who successfully pilots a stock company through the shoals
and shallows of forty weeks must have uncommon perspicacity. Not alone
must he secure players who are likely to become popular, but, more
important still, he must select plays that will appeal to all of his
patrons all of the time. Too much tragedy and he is quite sure to lose
the men in his gallery; too much comedy and the girls in the orchestra
begin to thin out. Then, too, his purse must be considered. The rental
of popular plays is high. When first the piece was released for stock
the royalties asked for "Peter Pan" were a thousand dollars per week.
Few plays bring as much as this, but royalties rarely are under one
hundred dollars and generally range between two hundred and fifty and
four hundred. Of course, there are many dramatic works whose age makes
them anybody's property, and the skillful manager balances his profit
and loss neatly by sandwiching these in with the costly ones. When
you see that your pet stock company is to follow "Salomy Jane" with
"Camille" you may be sure that its manager is evening up matters on
his books.

The same degree of skill that is required in other theatrical
advertising is required of the man who conducts a stock company.
Various odd schemes have been tried with effect, the best seeming to
be that of giving things away. There are now various theaters at which
food and drink is served between acts, generally eliciting real
evidences of appreciation. Personally, I cannot see how a bad
performance of "Too Much Johnson" with ice cream would be more
endurable than the same performance without, but apparently this
failure on my part indicates a unique state of mind. Receptions on the
stage, at which the public meets the players, have proved an
attraction, and they have the additional merit of helping to establish
the necessary _entente cordiale_. The distribution of actors'
photographs, the inauguration of guessing and voting contests, and
similar features, keep alert the brain of the man at the helm of the
small town "stock."

[Illustration: "_Evening up matters on his books_"]

To the most casual reader even this very casual article must have made
apparent the disadvantages of the average resident aggregation. First
among these, perhaps, is the impossibility of producing new plays
under a system which requires the presentation of fresh material so
frequently. A new play cannot possibly be rehearsed in a week. This is
a misfortune to the company, which must develop its best talent in
unhackneyed vehicles; a misfortune to the public, which must tire of
seeing second-handed comedies and tragedies; and most of all a
misfortune to the inner circle of theatrical folk, to whom the stock
organization should offer unrivalled opportunities for the quick and
inexpensive testing of untried manuscripts.

Since new plays are not within the range of these organizations, it
seems a pity that they cannot be allowed more leisurely preparation of
the old. Performances never can be good, much less artistic, while
they are made ready as rapidly as is necessary at present. Neither can
they be good so long as a certain small body of people must divide
among them whatever parts offer, regardless of equipment or natural
tendencies. Because Minnie Jones is suited to the _ingenue_ role in
this week's farce it does not follow that she will be ideal in the
_ingenue_ role of the tragedy done next week.

We hear that this sort of thing means excellent histrionic training,
but there is no law compelling audiences to attend training schools,
and the results of putting square pegs into any old sort of hole are
often too ludicrous. It is appalling to reflect that the lady who
plays Mrs. Micawber today may be cast for Du Barry tomorrow. I
remember one poor little girl who had been engaged to "do" soubrettes
at the National Theater, Washington. She was a charming little thing,
and for a whole season she successfully met all comers of her weight
and age. In "Esmeralda" I recall having thought her the most ethereal
of women. Two weeks later she became the comic opera star in "All the
Comforts of Home," and I discovered that what was spirituality in
"Esmeralda" became emaciation in red silk tights.

Much as I have harped on the disadvantages of the stock company, I
believe most solemnly that its advantages are over-balancing. Even bad
bread is better for the system than good whiskey, and a crude
performance of "Romeo and Juliet" is to be preferred to the best
possible performance of "The Girl and the Outlaw." The prices for
these "attractions" are about the same, and the people who now go to
see "Romeo and Juliet" are precisely the people who otherwise would go
to see "The Girl and the Outlaw." Slowly but surely, even the current
stock company interpretations educate the taste of theater-lovers,
until they begin asking for better things, and, seeking, find. In
addition, there seems no doubt that these organizations provide
exceptional schooling for young actors, who, by their aid, play two or
three hundred parts in a period during which otherwise they would
play five. It has been urged against this that they also acquire
habits of haste and carelessness, but I always have found actors with
stock experience superior to those without it. The consequence of this
particular phase of the stock system must be of inestimable value to
the theater in America.

Then, too, it is a kind of interchangeable cause and effect that the
quality of stock performances improves with the taste of their
patrons. Of late years, fewer autographed photographs have been
distributed among audiences, and more money has been spent in the
painting of proper scenery. Manner has been less frequently required
for stage receptions, and more frequently for drawing room drama. The
combination of several organizations under one management, like that
of the Baker Chain, in Seattle, Portland and Spokane, with consequent
possibilities of reciprocal borrowing, has accomplished wonders in the
way of betterment.

"Out West", where touring companies are rarer than this side of the
Missouri, and where metropolitan successes arrive tardily, notably
fine stock aggregations have come largely to take the place of
visiting stars. There are two excellent companies located in Los
Angeles, and I have heard that the superiority of their performances
has seriously injured the business of the "first class" theaters. John
Blackwood, at the Belasco, and Oliver Morosco, at the Burbank, make
complete productions of every piece offered, and often they are able
to give Los Angelites their first view of some much-discussed triumph
of Broadway. In such cases, it is not unusual for the play to last six
or eight weeks, and George Broadhurst's "The Dollar Mark", initially
presented at the Belasco, had a longer run there than in New York. It
will be seen at once how such public support enables a company to be
worthier of support--a kind of beneficent perpetual motion.

While the East is not yet so far advanced, nor so nearly rid of the
stock company that has been made typical in this article, there are
fine organizations in half a dozen of our larger cities. It can be
only a matter of time before enforced haste and economy in staging
stock performances will disappear before the demands of a more and
more enlightened clientele. There will be a greater number of
rehearsals and a smaller number of matinees. The people who patronize
these presentations now will have got ahead in the world, and will be
able and willing to pay more generously for their entertainment, and
it is to be hoped that the people who turned to moving pictures from
cheap melodrama--which, in its whilom prosperity, we are to consider
in our next chapter--in due time may turn from moving pictures to
adequate representations of classic, standard and popular plays.

All this will come in the nature of evolution. The movement will be
accelerated if Charles Frohman keeps his promise of giving us in New
York such a stock company as his brother maintained at the old Lyceum,
and which, at the same time, included Edward J. Morgan, William
Courtleigh, George C. Boniface, Mary Mannering, Elizabeth Tyree, Mrs.
Charles Walcot, Hilda Spong, Grant Stewart, Mrs. Thomas Whiffen, and
John Findlay.




_SITTING IN JUDGMENT WITH THE GODS_

     Being an old manuscript with a new preface--the former dealing
     with a lost art, and the latter subtly suggesting who lost it.


The article that fills the following pages was written in 1905.
Originally printed as a protest and a prophecy, it is reprinted here
as history.

Melodrama is dead. It died of poor circulation and failure of the box
office receipts. There were no flowers, and there need be no regrets.
Neither is there reason to fear resuscitation.

I should like to think that popular priced melodrama had been killed
by a general desire for better things. That, however, is not the case.
The death blow was struck when the inventor of moving pictures
supplied a form of entertainment that demanded even less of the
spectator than had been demanded by such classics as "Through Death
Valley" and "The Millionaire and the Policeman's Wife." The people
who patronized these plays are not now patronizing worthier plays;
they are attending performances that appeal to them wholly through the
medium of the eye.

Of the seven theaters mentioned in this article at present three are
devoted to moving pictures, two to burlesque, one to vaudeville, and
one to drama in Yiddish. A few cheap companies are presenting
melodrama in the provinces, but not a single place of amusement
shelters it in New York. Requiescat in pace.

"Sitting in Judgment With the Gods" is republished as a contemporary
opinion of a lost art. It was my intention to alter the wording
somewhat, substituting more recent examples for those mentioned, but I
found the result was apt to be like a history of Rome brought
"up-to-date" by introducing gattling guns at the Battle of Pharsalius.
So here is the story as it was set down in the beginning, and may you
find amusement in reading it.

Melodrama, according to my dictionary, is "a dramatic performance,
usually tragic, in which songs are introduced." The encyclopedia adds
that the name was bestowed first upon "the opera by Rinuccini", and
that it was derived from two Greek words meaning song and drama. This
is extremely awesome and impressive, but I'm afraid I can't allow you
to accept it as applying to offerings in our popular-priced places of
amusement. Melodrama isn't a bit like that in New York.

It was the dictionary that started me on a tour of investigation which
comprehended visits to all of the seven theaters in town that
habitually present melodrama. There are so many classes of people in
this big city, and each class has so many characteristic ways of
working and playing, that no one hundredth of the population can be
expected to know how any other one hundredth lives. The men and women
who go to see "Man and Superman" don't go to see "No Mother to Guide
Her", and I think I am quite safe in saying that most of the men and
women who witness "No Mother to Guide Her" are conspicuous by their
absence at "Man and Superman."

Sitting in judgment with the gods leaves me in doubt as to why the
latter part of this statement should be true. The plays of the "No
Mother to Guide Her" type are so hopelessly bad, so obviously false,
so absolutely vicious, that it is hard to comprehend a mind that can
prefer them, if not to "Man and Superman", at least to such better
melodramas as "The Lion and the Mouse" or "The Squaw Man." The matter
of money is no explanation at all. Harry and Harriet might have
excellent seats in the balcony of the Lyceum or Wallack's for the
price of orchestra chairs at the American, and, if it comes to pride,
what choice is there between the gallery, politely disguised as "the
second balcony," of the Belasco, and a box at the Thalia?

Melodrama today not only differs from the melodrama of
day-before-yesterday defined in the dictionary, but it differs too
from the melodrama of yesterday. Bartley Campbell and Dion Boucicault
have given way to Theodore Kremer and Martin Hurley, while sterling
old plays like "Siberia" and "The Octoroon" have been supplanted by
such monstrosities as "Why Girls Leave Home" and "Too Proud to Beg."
Our dramatic literature knows no finer examples of play-building than
"The Two Orphans" and "The Rommany Rye", but these pieces are popular
no longer with the people who frequent the Fourteenth Street and the
Third Avenue. Fading interest in works of that kind led to a falling
off in the patronage of "popular-priced" houses which was arrested
only by an immediate appeal to the lowest and basest passions of which
mankind is capable. It is on the power of pandering to these passions
that the present vogue of melodrama is founded.

Emile Zola, that great photographer of souls, would have found in a
visit to one of New York's low-priced theaters unlimited scope for
analysis of character, comment on decay, and description of dirt and
squalor. The Murray Hill Theater, the Third Avenue, the Thalia, the
American and the Metropolis, five of the seven local places of
amusement given up to sensational plays, are relics of infinitely
better days. The Thalia was known formerly as the Bowery Theater, and
its stage has supported nearly all the great actors of an earlier
time. McKee Rankin, in his palmiest period, directed the fortunes of
the Third Avenue, while each of the other three houses was intended
originally for the best class of productions. The New Star, alone
among buildings of its class, has no history except that it is making
now.

The Thalia, where I began my travels, is full of contrasts. Evidences
of departed grandeur elbow old dirt and new gaudiness. In the lobby,
with its marble floor and lofty ceiling, stand hard-faced officials in
uniforms that glitter with gold braid. Lithographic representations of
various kinds of crime and violence hang on the walls, advertising the
attraction to follow that holding the boards. The auditorium is
architecturally stately and old fashioned, bearing an outline
resemblance to the colosseum at Rome. The ground floor is a succession
of steps, on each of which is a row of seats, while three balconies of
horse-shoe shape afford opportunities to the patron whose financial
limit is ten, twenty or thirty cents. There are queer little boxes on
either side of the stage, which slopes perceptibly and has in its
middle a prompter's hood--survival of the days when parts were so
long, and so many had to be learned each week, that no actor could be
trusted out of sight of the man with the manuscript. The Thalia is a
theatrical anachronism, dilapidated, decayed and degraded. It is a
royal sepulchre containing rags and old iron, a family mansion
utilized as a boarding house, a Temple of Thespis managed by "Al"
Woods and devoted, on the night of my visit, to the representation of
a stirring comedy drama in five acts, entitled "Lured From Home."

The audiences at the Thalia are composed principally of peddlers,
'longshoremen and girls from the sweat shops. Farther up town one
sees sailors and mechanics, with a sprinkling of families large
enough, numerically and physically, to delight Roosevelt. Everywhere
small boys abound and Jews predominate. Perched aloft in the gallery,
one picks out scores of types and observes dozens of humorous
incidents. Down town there were men who took off their coats and kept
on their hats, probably for no better reason than that they were
supposed to do neither. A fat negress sat next to a loudly dressed
shop girl, who was too absorbed to draw the color line while the
performance was in progress, but glared furiously between acts. The
contention that the Third Avenue is "a family theater" was supported
by a mother who nursed her baby whenever the curtain was down and the
lights up. Two precocious youths discussed the "form" of certain
horses that were to race next day, while their "best goils", one on
either side, alternately stared at each other and at their programs.
Reference to this bill of the play, printed by the same firm that
supplies programs for the better class of theaters, disclosed the
fact that a large part of the pamphlet was devoted to articles on
"What the Man Will Wear" and "Chafing Dish Suggestions." It seemed to
me that these indicated utter lack of a sense of humor on the part of
publisher and manager. "The Man" at the Third Avenue probably wears
whatever is cheapest, and I can't fancy the woman feeling a keen
interest in oyster pan toast or orange mousse.

[Illustration: "_The Thalia's stage has supported nearly all the great
actors of an earlier time_"]

Barring a little difference in millinery and a difference of opinion
as to the indispensability of neckwear, the audiences at all these
theaters are very much alike. They read pink papers assiduously before
the play begins and eat industriously throughout the intermissions.
Melodrama seems to affect the American appetite much as does an
excursion. You may have noticed that lunches appear the moment a
pleasure trip begins, and every cessation of histrionic action at a
popular-priced house is a signal for the munching of apples, candy,
pop-corn, peanuts or chewing gum. Most of the material for these
feasts is furnished by small boys who begin the evening selling "song
books" and conclude it dispensing provisions. Just as the orchestra
emerges from under the stage the merchant appears, taking his place at
the foot of an aisle and unburdening his soul of a carefully prepared
announcement. "I wish to call your attention for just about a few
minutes to the company's 'song book'", he commences. These volumes
invariably are marked down from ten to five cents, and, for good
measure, the vendor throws in an old copy of The Police Gazette.
Sweets are his stock in trade between acts, though one also has the
pleasure of hearing him announce: "Now, friends, I've a postal card
guaranteed to make you laugh without any trouble."

Reserve is not a characteristic of these gatherings. They hiss
steamily at what they are pleased to consider evil, and applaud with
equal heartiness that which seems to them good. Especially remarkable
instances of virtue also bring out shrill whistles, verbal comment and
the stamping of feet. The management maintains in the gallery a play
censor with a club, who knocks loudly against the railing when he
feels that these evidences of approval are passing bounds. What would
not your two dollar impressario give if he could transplant this
enthusiasm to Broadway? How gladly Charles Frohman or Henry W. Savage
would trade his surfeited first night audience for one of those which
requires only an heroic speech to wear out its individual hands in
frenzied applause!

They are a queer, child-like lot--the people who compose the clientele
of the Murray Hill and the Third Avenue. Intermissions have to be made
short for them, because they have not the patience to wait for setting
scenery, and he would be an intrepid dramatist who would put
sufficient faith in the intensity of a situation to trust to its
keeping them quiet in the dark. To an assembly at the Thalia the
turning out of the lights for the husband's confession in "The
Climbers" would have proved only an opportunity for making weird
noises without danger of being "spotted" by the "bouncer." Their
tastes are primitive and their sympathies elemental. They have no time
for fine distinctions between right and wrong; a character is good to
them or it is bad, and there's an end to the matter. Ready and waiting
with their pity, one cannot help believing that they feel only on the
surface, since they are quite able to forget the tragedy of one moment
in the comedy of the next. I have seen them sob like babies at the
death of a child in the play and break into uproarious laughter a
second later at the intrusion of the soubrette. Their prejudices are
explicable, but unexpectedly strong, favoring the unfortunate under
any circumstances and finding vent in bitter hatred of the prosperous.
They are the natural enemies of the police officer, and, by the same
token, friends to the cracksman or the convict who expresses a
particle of decency. Physical heroism is the only kind these men and
women recognize, and emphasis rather than ethics influences their
verdict on questions of virtue and vice. Apparently the element of
surprise is not a dramatic requisite with them, since every habitual
playgoer of their class must know by heart every melodramatic theme in
existence, together with its incidents and its outcome. Undivided in
their approval of the noble and their disapproval of the ignoble, one
soon learns that their ideas on the subject are theories not intended
for practice. The man who most loudly applauds defence of a woman on
the stage is not always above disciplining his wife vigorously when he
gets home. "Zash right!" I heard an inebriate call to a melodramatic
hero who had spurned the glass offered him. "Zash right! Don't you
tush it!"

[Illustration: "_A play censor with a club_"]

I have said that the stories and situations of melodrama must be
familiar to the folk who attend such performances, and I speak
advisedly. One melodrama is as much like another as are two circuses.
Drifting into the American one night just as the players were
indulging themselves in that walk before the curtain which is their
traditional method of acknowledging a "call", I might easily have
mistaken the principal pedestrians for the characters I had seen
fifteen minutes before at the Third Avenue. There they were without
exception--the sailor-hero, the wronged heroine in black, the
high-hatted villain, the ragged child, the short-skirted soubrette,
the police officer, the apple woman, the negro and the comic Jew. Some
of these types, notably the apple woman and the negro, are as old as
melodrama, while others are but recently borrowed from vaudeville.
Whatever their origin, they are the handy puppets of the man who
writes this kind of play; identified the moment they step on the stage
and hissed or applauded according to the conduct expected of them.

This sameness of character is paralleled by a sameness of dialogue
that is amazing. Few melodramatic heroes do very much to justify their
popularity, but all of them have a pugilistic fondness for talking
about what they are going to do. Certain phrases favored by this class
of playwright have been used so often that the most casual
theater-goer will be able to recall them. "I can and will", "my
child", "stand back", "on his track", "do your worst", "you are no
longer a son of mine" and "if he knew all" are convenient terms for
expressing a variety of violent emotions. Most of them mean nothing
specific, and herein lies their recommendation. It is so much easier
to say "if he knew all" than to figure out precisely what part of a
purple past is of sufficient theatrical value to be dilated upon in a
speech.

Apropos of purple pasts and of heroines in black, it is worthy of note
that propriety in the hue of one's garb is another of the inviolable
conventions in the cheap theaters. Olga Nethersole probably thought
she was doing a wonderfully original thing some years ago when she
announced that she would wear various colors to typify the
regeneration of Camille, but a chromatic index to character antedates
the English actress by many decades. To anybody acquainted with
sensational plays a white dress means innocence, a black dress
suffering and a red dress guilt just as infallibly as the cigarette
habit and a _penchant_ for sitting on the arms of chairs indicates
utter depravity in a female. If you told an Eighth Avenue
amusement-lover that good women sometimes smoke and often sit on the
arms of chairs he wouldn't believe you.

With puppets and speeches to be had ready-made, the receipt for
writing a melodrama would not seem to be particularly complicated. The
favorite story for a piece of this sort concerns two men--one poor and
good, the other wealthy and bad--who love the same girl. For that
reason and because the hero "stands between" him and "a fortune", the
villain plans to "get him out of the way." The soubrette saves the
intended victim from death, the would-be assassin is disgraced, and
the play "ends happily." There may be a dozen variations of this
theme, such as an effort to send the hero to prison "for another's
crime", but, until managers found a gold mine in the lechery of their
low-browed patrons, it formed the central thread of four offerings out
of five. The stock plot now-a-days is the frustration of sundry
attempts to sell women to waiting despoilers; the dramatization of
what the newspapers describe, hideously enough, as "white slavery."
This is an unpleasant subject in any form, but the part it plays in
current melodrama is so gross and evil that I shall risk referring to
it again in another paragraph.

The "fortune" that serves as bone of contention in the tale related
above never happens to be less than a million. Such trifling sums as
fifty thousand pounds or a hundred thousand dollars are given very
little consideration in melodrama. Everyone of importance lives in a
"mansion" and carries about huge rolls of greenbacks. When the villain
tries to murder the hero he resists the temptation to stab or shoot
him quickly and quietly, having found the expedient of binding him
across a railway track or throwing his insensible body on a feed belt
more conducive to a thrilling rescue. Handmade murder has no place in
melodrama; all reputable scoundrels do their killing by machinery.
The strongest situation possible in the sensational play is that in
which the comedienne flags the train or stops the belt. Next to this
"big scene" is the inevitable encounter between the villain with a
knife, the unarmed hero, and the heroine, who arrives with a revolver
at what Joseph Cawthorne calls "the zoological moment." I have seen
the superiority of the pistol over the dagger demonstrated five times
in a single melodrama, yet the villain never seems to profit by
experience. One would think he would learn to carry a "gun", just as
one would think that the hero would learn not to leave his coat where
stolen bills might be placed in the pockets, but the playwrights of
the popular-priced theaters seem to model their people on the dictum
of Oscar Wilde, who said: "There are two kinds of women--the good
women, who are stupid, and the bad women, who are dangerous."
Notwithstanding their crass improbabilities, many melodramas of the
better sort are interesting and not without occasional evidences of
clumsy originality and crude strength. I enjoyed eight or ten genuine
thrills in the course of my tour of inspection.

[Illustration: "_All reputable scoundrels do their killing by
machinery_"]

If I was thrilled ten times, however, I was sickened and disgusted a
thousand times at the appeal to low animalism that has become the
dominant factor in these houses. Remembering the legal obstacles put
in the path of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," I could not help wondering
whether the Comstockians wear blinders that shut from their view
everything East and West of Broadway. Even if their mental harness
includes this visage-narrowing accoutrement it is difficult to
understand why the billboards scattered about town have not indicated
to these censors the trend of the popular-priced theaters. Do not the
titles of the pieces presented indicate the truth of the situation?
What may one suppose is the character of such plays as "Her First
False Step", "Dealers in White Women", "Why Women Sin", "Queen of the
White Slaves" and "New York by Night"?

"Dangers of Working Girls", a piece of this type which I saw at the
American, might easily be set down as one of the worst of the
"Dangers of Working Girls." The principal figure in the play was
Doctor Sakea, whose profession was Mrs. Warren's and whose assistants
were Chinamen hired to lure maidens into a place of evil resort. The
production was full of such lines as "Don't spoil her beauty; it means
money to us" and "Ah! More pretty girls for the master's cage", while
its principal situation was the auctioning of a number of half-dressed
women to the highest bidder. For this scene a crowd of bestial
degenerates attracted by the posters waited with gloating eyes and
open jaws. There was no sugar-coating over the pill--no bright
dialogue, no philosophy, no hint at a "moral lesson." It was simply a
ghastly, hideous, degrading appeal to everything that is vile and
loathsome in the under side of human nature.

[Illustration: "_Comstockians wear blinders that shut from their view
everything East and West of Broadway_"]

The financial success of such pieces as these seems to decide once for
all the question as to whether public taste influences the drama or
the drama public taste. With clean and clever plays a stone's throw
away, at prices by no means prohibitive, no one need attend such
performances as that I have described unless he really delights in
that form of entertainment. I have always insisted that nothing is
more immoral than bad art, and, this being true, the influence of the
popular-priced theater appears to be a very grave subject, indeed. The
people who go to such places of amusement have so little pleasure in
their lives that it would seem a pity to take away whatever they may
crave, yet it is not improbable that these very people might be
inclined toward an appreciation of better things in the playhouse. We
who object to the description of crime and violence in the daily
papers certainly may be expected to find evil in its depiction on the
stage; we who fear the discussion of delicate topics before audiences
of cultured men and women can find nothing to excuse morbid emphasis
upon distressing scenes before ignorant and impressionable boys and
girls. Whether or not they really believe that such plays reflect
life, whether or not they are directly influenced, there certainly can
be nothing beneficial to them in constant observation of coarse
humor, silly pathos, and a distorted code of conduct. I wonder if
there is any method by which these play-goers can be made to
understand that cleverness is not incompatible with entertainment nor
good drama with interest.




_THE SMART SET ON THE STAGE_

     Wherein the author considers comedies of manners, and players
     who succeed illy in living up to them.


"The theater has its own aristocracy", declares the author of a book
about families that, generation after generation, have given actors to
that institution in America. It is not of "its own aristocracy" that I
intend writing, but of the aristocracy it mimics. When I speak of "The
Smart Set on the Stage", the reference is to those men and women who
trail their cigarette smoke and their gowns through the modern society
play.

There are fashions in drama, just as there are in dresses, and
managerial modistes begin to sense a return to favor of the tea cup
comedy. Fifteen years ago, during an era of romance, the tinsmith
superceded the tailor. A decade later, "guns" were more worn than
girdles, and the prevailing mode in millinery was the Mexican
sombrero, with a leather belt in place of a band. The hero of a play
was the male who could shoot straightest. Now, once again, the hero is
the gentleman who can successfully balance, at one and the same time,
a punch glass, a plate of biscuits, and the arguments for and against
running away with his friend's wife. Within the past few months we
have had such examples of their school as "Electricity", "Smith", "The
Gamblers", "Nobody's Widow", "Getting a Polish" and "We Can't Be as
Bad as All That", the last by that inveterate dramatizer of the social
whirl, Henry Arthur Jones. With Jones in his heaven, all's right with
the whirl'd!

Nor do these six compose a complete list. Mary Garden is still
"wallowing", and surely Salome belonged to one of the best families of
the East! Lady Macbeth and her husband--not the Macbeths who make lamp
chimneys; O, dear no!--must have been in the blue book of their day.
We met some very nice people with Mary Magdalene, too, and Prince
Bellidor, in "Sister Beatrice", behaved like one of the idle rich,
but inasmuch as their conduct in society, ancient or modern, was not
the theme of the works in which they appeared I shall omit further
mention of these works.

The rich we have always with us. That is why Thackeray is more popular
than Dickens, and that is why the smart set has been paraded
theatrically since Thespis took the first wagon show on a tour of
Greece. We are a lot of Pomonas--particularly the women among us--and
we cannot help revelling in the doings of dignitaries whose place in
life, but for fear of making this article sound railroad-y, I should
describe as an elevated station. The more humble we are the greater
the craving and the delight. Lizzie Brown, who measures ribbon behind
a counter from breakfast 'til dinner, naturally extracts infinite
pleasure from spending her evenings with only a row of footlights
between herself and wonderful beings who toil not and spin nothing but
yarns. That is almost like moving in the best circles oneself; it is
being transported to a world millions of miles from the brass tracks
in the ribbon counter. Miss Brown half believes herself a great lady
by morning, as you may judge by her manner if you go to her for a yard
of baby blue. Everyone of us has something of Lizzie Brown in his or
her make-up. The same instinct that moves us to marry our daughter to
the Prince of This or the Duke of That causes us to remember "East
Lynne" when we have forgotten "Hazel Kirke."

Most of us outside the charmed circle have ideas of good society quite
as exaggerated as the Biblical idea of Paradise. We may not fancy that
fashionables go about with crowns of light and golden harps, but we do
insist that on the stage they behave as little as possible like
ordinary human beings.

That is why it is so difficult to write society plays. If the
characters you create do not feel and think normally they become
puppets, and if they do you are accused at once of having failed to
suggest smartness. One night I stood in the lobby of the Criterion
Theater as the audience came out after having seen "Her Great Match."
A woman who passed me remarked: "I think it was charming, but that man
didn't make love at all like a Prince." Just what are the
peculiarities of royal love-making the lady didn't explain, and the
idiosyncracies that got the only prince I ever knew into jail had to
do, not with the _way_ he courted, but with the number of times. In
any event, it was proved afterward that my friend really was descended
from a respectable veterinary surgeon, which disqualifies me as an
authority on the subject. When I mentioned the matter to him, Mr.
Fitch observed that he had been quite chummy with a prince or two, and
that, while he never actually had seen them make love, he judged from
their consorts that their powers of amatory expression were quite
ordinary. "However", quoth Mr. Fitch, "you can't expect the public to
believe _that_."

It used to be a pretty general impression that nobody who had more
than twenty thousand a year ever indulged in a show of emotion. I say
"nobody", although, of course, you are aware that wealthy parents in
society plays always are exceptions to the rule of good breeding.
Otherwise, imperturbability of the John Drew kind was supposed to be a
trade mark of culture blown in the bottle. Common folk might laugh or
cry under stress of circumstances, but the souls of the elect were
sheathed in ice. The approved manner of translating a crisis into the
dialogue of the drawing room was something like this:

[Illustration: "_The peculiarities of royal love-making_"]

_Lord Dash_: Good afternoon! Rippin' weather, isn't it? (Bus. of
stroking mustache.) I've a bit of disagreeable news for you.

_Lady Blank_: Indeed? Will you have a cup of tea, Lord Dash? What is
it?

_Lord Dash_: No, thank you; I never take tea. Your eldest son, havin'
been detected in an act of forgery, has just blown out his bally
brains.

_Lady Blank_: Poor lad! He was always impulsive! I hope he isn't
seriously hurt, Lord Dash? Dead? Ah! Now you really must let me pour
you a cup of tea.

Having to combat that sort of folly was the thing that made it hard to
write a society play. It was like dramatizing a novel and trying to
create a heroine who would agree with the ten thousand notions of her
cherished by the ten thousand readers of the book. Gradually, as the
mirror held up to nature has become more nearly true, we have grown to
understand that, in the grip of a great joy or grief, a nobleman
behaves very much like a bricklayer; sometimes a trifle better, and
sometimes, as in the case of the bazaar disaster in Paris, a good deal
worse.

One fact not universally understood by persons who criticize the smart
set on the stage is that there are many kinds of society. The group
depicted in "Gallops" or "Lord and Lady Algy" is antipodally different
from that shown in "The Way of the World" or "His House in Order." The
self-made men of "The Pit" and "The Lion and the Mouse" are miles
removed from the aristocrats of "The Idler" or "A Royal Family." The
gambling males and cigarette-smoking females of "The Walls of Jericho"
and "The House of Mirth" have very little in common with the
conservatives of "The Hypocrites" and "The Duke of Killicrankie." All
society looks alike to the assistant dramatic editor, however, and, if
some girl delivers herself of a slang phrase, he is quick to realize
that the playwright who created her can know nothing of good form.

The man who deals with fashionables on the stage fingers a pianoforte
with a single octave. More than half of the conditions that produce
sentiment and sensation in Harlem never get as far down town as Fifth
Avenue. That is why most drawing room dramas are worked out with the
same characters and about the same stories. Someone has said that
there do not exist more than three plots for farce; certainly, not
more than ten have been used in society plays. Of these, the favorite
is the tale of the good-for-nothing gentleman who goes away with the
wife of the studious or hard-working hero. Sometimes, he is only
_about_ to go away with this malcontent when the hero aforesaid finds
her at midnight in the "rooms" of his rival. The places in which a
woman is found at midnight are always "rooms"; never, by any chance,
chambers, or apartments, or a flat. Occasionally, the lady, or the
gentleman, or both, are quite innocent of wrong-doing. The lady may
have come to save the reputation of another lady, or to prepare a
rarebit, but when the husband has tracked her by the fan that years of
Wilde have not taught such callers to hide with them, he gets into a
towering rage and does not get out again until the end of the fourth
act. Henry Arthur Jones calls tea the prop of our drama. I disagree
with him. It is the careless lady with a _penchant_ for nocturnal
visits who makes the theater possible in England and America. You
don't believe it? Well, some of the comedies produced in New York
during one season in which this incident figured were "Popularity",
"Man and His Angel", "The Chorus Lady", "The Three of Us", "The House
of Mirth", "Daughters of Men", "The Straight Road", and
"All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." James M. Barrie satirized the situation in
"Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire", and then employed it seriously for his most
effective scene.

[Illustration: "_The lady may have come to prepare a rarebit_"]

Of course, one or two of the pieces in the list given do not come
strictly under the head of drawing room drama, but the fact remains
that a majority of the young women who go calling on the stroke of
twelve dive into indiscretion under Marcel waves. The coveting of his
neighbor's wife is supposed to be a specialty of the society man, and
thus it is that so many comedies of manors are founded on that theme.
The marriage of convenience is much used in plays of this type, too,
as well as the _mesalliance_ that afterward turns out well. Divorce is
coming more and more into vogue as a subject. Then there are satires
in which the follies of the smart set are held up to ridicule and
execration; comedies in which the vulgarisms of a very rich man,
usually an American and father of the heroine, are contrasted
favorably with the culture of the aristocracy of Europe; and plays in
which the wronged girl figures, wearing a wan expression and a
becoming black dress. Add to these varieties that class of composition
in which society is only the background for contests in politics,
diplomacy, business, or detective work, and we have pretty well come
to the end of our possibilities.

Whatever else happens in the society play, there always is a dance at
which the juvenile lovers flirt, and the serious people discuss such
tragic things as ruin and sudden death, while an orchestra "off at R."
fiddles through "Love's Dream After the Ball." Next to elopements,
ruin and sudden death are the chief necessities of the society play.
Whenever a gentleman gets on the wrong side of the market, or has the
misfortune to possess a wife whose lover is the hero of the piece,
instead of the villain, he promptly kills himself. After reading a
succession of dramas like "The Climbers" and "The Moth and the Flame"
one is amazed to discover that in the United States only about one
hundreth of one per cent. of the population cashes in its checks
self-endorsed.

If you have followed so far, patient peruser, you probably will join
me in the conclusion that the society play is nothing on earth but
melodrama in a frock coat. The effectiveness of the play depends upon
the completeness of the disguise; with the dramatic tailor rests the
question whether you sniff or sniffle. Undraped melodrama treating of
fashionable folk is the funniest entertainment in the world, excepting
"Charley's Aunt." Fine evenings, when my brain cells were closed for
repairs and I was weary of musical comedy, I used to go over to Eighth
Avenue and see "Why Women Sin" and "A Working Girl's Wrongs." I found
that our class is responsible alike for the sins and the wrongs; that
gentility is a thing to move virtuous burglars, comic green grocers
and other honest men and women to a passion of righteous indignation.
"I was ne'er so thrummed since I was gentleman", wrote Thomas Dekker
in an ancient comedy of unprintable title, and it is my opinion that
he penned the line after seeing his kind through the astigmatic
glasses of Theodore Kremer. Small wonder, indeed! On Eighth Avenue,
in the old days, everyone sufficiently prosperous to be opposed to an
income tax wore a silk hat and lived in a "mansion." Apparently
"mansions" were not places in which privacy was to be had, since the
Eighth Avenue millionaire invariably came out into the street when he
wanted to exhibit "the papers." Eighth Avenue millionaires always were
white-haired, drank cold tea and soda, plotted "dirty work", and had
closets so full of skeletons that any physician might have mistaken
them for anatomical museums. "Little children", I used to say to the
progeny of a friend of mine, "when you grow up be careful not to be an
Eighth Avenue millionaire."

The smart set have rather a hard time of it on any stage, and, for
that matter, so does the author who dallies with the subject. If there
is one thing in which the dramatic _grand monde_ are lucky it is their
servants. Nowhere else under the blue canopy of heaven are such
perfectly trained menials as one sees through the proscenium arch.
They would make the fortune of any of those agencies misnamed
"intelligence bureaus."

[Illustration: "_Why women sin_"]

I already have commented on the difficulties of the man who writes
drawing room drama. I have said that, if he has a stirring story to
tell, he must disguise it. On the other hand, if it be his ambition to
compose comedies of manners, like "The Liars", he must master the very
fine art of interesting an audience for two hours without actually
doing anything; of making a vacuum shimmer. The people in such society
plays must talk like ordinary people who have been seeing society
plays. Their dialogue must be cynical and clever, and just a bit what
a witty Frenchman called "_sans chemise_." A society play excellently
exemplifies the truth of the adage: "Nothing _risque_; nothing
gained." Should the conversation be truly bright the critics may be
counted upon to observe that real people never talk that way; but it
is better to beard the critics than to bore the audience. If I may add
to a line from "Clothes": "Hell and the stage drawing room are two
places where there are no stupid people."

It is no easy matter for the average playwright to reproduce the
atmosphere of Fifth Avenue. Many of the nabobs one glimpses in the
theatre fall about three hundred and sixty short of the "four
hundred." Every second comedy of manners we see is a comedy of very
bad manners. Men born with gold spoons in their mouths find it hard to
articulate, and few of our fashionable families produce dramatists who
"speak in a voice that fills the nation." Only the most successful of
the craft get an opportunity to study society at first hand. Perhaps
that is fortunate. "The drawback to realism", says Wilton Lackaye, "is
the fate of the realist. If he goes into the slums he becomes base; if
he goes into society he becomes soprano." The average social lion
being the sort of man one could push over, we ought to be glad of the
barrier between the pen, which only writes, and money, which talks.
Vigor and virility are more essential to good drama than absolutely
faithful atmosphere. All other things being equal, the individual who
would make the best pugilist would make the best playwright.

A good many of our society plays are marred by _gaucheries_ of a
serious nature. Glance over your mental list of tea-cup pieces. Clyde
Fitch, who rarely offended in this respect, had one woman giving
orders to the servants of another woman in "The Truth." Jack Neville,
in the Elsie de Wolfe performance of "The Way of the World", whistled
merrily while waiting in her parlor for his hostess. True, he didn't
whistle very noisily, but that palliation only makes one think of the
retort courteous supposed to have been made by a well-bred woman after
she had complained of a gentleman who whistled in her ball room. "It
was very low", plead the gentleman. "It _was_", answered the lady;
"_very_ low."

Cynthia, in the comedy of that name, received her husband while the
hairdresser and the manicure were employed with her. Dick Crawford, in
"Caught in the Rain", tips a servant in the home of his friend, Mr.
Mason. Everybody who visits Montgomery Brewster in the first act of
"Brewster's Millions" comments most vulgarly on that hero's newly
acquired wealth. Richard Burbank in "Clothes" mistakes Miss Sherwood's
piano for a hat rack, while that lady permits herself to be led away
from a dance without bidding farewell to her hostess. In "The House of
Mirth", a sandless-souled hero, named Lawrence Selden, literally
thrust himself past a protesting servant and into the rooms of
Augustus Trenor. The young woman impersonated by Edna May in "The
Catch of the Season" was given tiffen consisting of a hunk of bread an
inch thick and tea in a cup that bore all the ear-marks of belonging
to that family of unbreakable things that are used in the second cabin
of ocean liners. These, of course, are "trifles light as air", but
what shall be said of Charles Richman in dress clothes and light boots
in "Mrs. Dane's Defence", of Margaret Dale in decollette and walking
hat in "Delancy", and of Mrs. Fiske's laying her handkerchief on the
luncheon table in "Becky Sharp?" Above all, what shall be said of the
gentleman in "The Triangle" who stabbed his better half with a carving
knife at dinner. I may be ignorant of what I seek to teach and quite
wrong about these other _faux pas_, but _that_ certainly cannot be
condemned too forcibly. It simply isn't done!

"Popularity", George Cohan's play that afterward became "The Man Who
Owns Broadway", was a perfect mine of ill breeding. In the first
place, the Fuller drawing room, as shown, was a flaring red, with a
piano on which the manufacturer's name was painted in letters two
inches high. During the evening there were several callers, whom the
Fullers left quite alone for a period of fifteen minutes. The butler
atoned for this rudeness by shaking hands with one of the guests, a
young gentleman unfortunately crossed in love, and expressing sympathy
for him. The young gentleman said he was much obliged. The climax of
this singular exhibition was reached when a "matinee idol", dropping
in without invitation on Papa Fuller, whom he had never met, lit a
cigar, instructed the sympathetic butler to bring him spirituous
liquor, and told his host a few things about gentlemen in general and
the host himself in particular.

The familiarity of the butler in "Popularity" was as nothing to the
behavior of the servants in "Forty-five Minutes From Broadway", where
several menials seemed to subscribe heartily to Paul Blouet's dictum
that "America is a country in which every man is as good as his
neighbor and a damned sight better." The mother in the noisy farce of
"Julie Bonbon" who objected to having her son marry a milliner might
have improved her own manners in any millinery shop on Fifth Avenue. A
chambermaid in "Susan in Search of a Husband" introduced to each other
two guests of her hotel; Vida Phillimore in "The New York Idea"
received in her boudoir a nobleman who had been presented to her only
the day before; Mrs. O'Mara addressed her daughter and ignored the
visitor who was chatting with her in "All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." The
reception room revealed in "The Daughters of Men" looked like the
interior of a jewel box, and served as the abiding place of a
wonderful collection of amusingly stiff-backed men and women,
representing the smart set as, at that time, it was imagined by
Charles Klein.

[Illustration: "_It simply isn't done!_"]

Fortunately, errors of taste in staging society plays become fewer and
less conspicuous every day. They are practically obsolete now in
theaters like the Empire, the Lyceum, the Hudson, and the Belasco.
With them has gone the time in which every fashionable apartment was
furnished in exactly the same way and had doors in exactly the same
place. The producer who "dresses" a stage today buys precisely as
though he had a commission to "dress" the home of a wealthy and
intelligent client. Under these circumstances, it is particularly
fortunate that the comedy of manners and the drama of the drawing room
have come to stay. Cultured people are pleasant companions in everyday
life, and doubly pleasant when they have been idealized and
super-refined for library or theater. We may be glad of the evident
fact that plays may come and plays may go, but the society play goes
on forever.




Transcriber's Note:


Archaic and inconsistent spelling retained.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Footlights Fore and Aft, by Channing Pollock