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                        I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN




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                          _PLAYS BY MR. DAVIS_

                                Icebound
                               The Detour
                           The Nervous Wreck
                               and others




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[Illustration:

  OWEN DAVIS
  (Photograph from White Studio)
]


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                                I’D LIKE
                             TO DO IT AGAIN




                                   by
                               OWEN DAVIS





[Illustration]





                   _FARRAR & RINEHART, INCORPORATED_
                   _ON MURRAY HILL - - - - NEW YORK_


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[Illustration]


                     COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY OWEN DAVIS
                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




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                            ────────────────
                                CONTENTS
                            ────────────────


                           I. FALSE STARTS, 3

                     II. SELLING THE FIRST ONE, 22

                         III. THEN AND NOW, 47

                        IV. “HOLD, VILLAIN!” 77

                       V. UP FROM MELODRAMA, 108

               VI. HOW TO WRITE THREE HUNDRED PLAYS, 146

                  VII. THE DRAMATIST’S PROFESSION, 171

                          VIII. HOLLYWOOD, 206

                    IX. I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN, 231


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                            ────────────────
                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
                            ────────────────


               Owen Davis                        Frontis

               When he entered Harvard in              4
                 1889

               “Aside from being a fair                5
                 football player”

               Gus Hill, Champion Club                10
                 Swinger

               Maurice Barrymore                      11

               Fanny Janauschek as Medea              14

               Lawrence Barrett                       15

               Sally Cohen                            20

               John C. Rice                           21

               “O’Neill listened to my                24
                 reading of the part”

               Edwin Booth as Richelieu               25

               “I took one of my first plays          30
                 to the Frohman office”

               Harrigan and Hart                      31

               “The B’s were led by the name          38
                 of William A. Brady”

               “Henry Miller was the greatest         39
                 teacher”

               A. M. Palmer                           50

               “Augustin Daly was a master”           51

               “William Winter was the                60
                 outstanding critic”

               David Belasco                          61

               Elizabeth Dreyer                       90

               Laurette Taylor                        91

               Joseph Jefferson                      120

               “I have always admired                121
                 Augustus Thomas”

               Robert H. Davis                       140

               Owen Davis and his two sons           141

               Owen Davis, Jr., actor                160

               Donald Davis, playwright              161


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                        I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN




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                            ────────────────
                        CHAPTER I ◆ FALSE STARTS
                            ────────────────


At the time of my mother’s death some fifteen years ago, we found among
her cherished possessions a soiled and tattered old manuscript written
in a scrawling school-boy hand, and inscribed in her neat and graceful
lettering—“Owen’s first play, when he was just nine years old.” This
opus bore the somewhat violent title of DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND OR THE RIVAL
DETECTIVES and upon reading it over I was struck by one marked
originality—toward the end of the first act only one of the characters
remained alive, and as the final curtain fell he committed suicide. I
had reached some degree of success long before my mother’s death, and,
once or twice, when some friend spoke of one of my plays as “the best
thing I ever wrote,” I noticed a somewhat scornful smile on her
sensitive lips. She had all of the reticence of the true Yankee and,
secure in her possession of the only copy of DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND, she
could afford to smile.

As a matter of truth, she smiled more frequently than one would expect
of the mother of eight children, and her strong and dauntless ambition
saw no limits at all to the future of her brood. To those who knew her
there is no mystery in the fact that a boy of nine, born in a country
town many years before the talking pictures had brought the drama to
every hamlet in the world, should have been born with the trick of
creating dramatic narrative and the fierce longing to create it.

Bangor, Maine, in the early 80’s knew little of the theater. I may have
seen UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, Edwin Booth, Joe Jefferson and possibly one or
two others, for in those days New York had no monopoly, our great actors
played everywhere—but the theater meant less than nothing to my father
and little more to any member of our community.

[Illustration:

  Owen Davis when he entered Harvard in 1889
]

I had been born, however, with the smell of the stage in my nostrils and
was as stage-struck before I ever saw a stage as I am to-day after
almost thirty-five years, during which I have seen very little else and
have bitterly resented the few hours I have passed in any other
atmosphere.


[Illustration:

  “Aside from being a fair football player and a very fast hundred-yard
    sprinter, I did little to distinguish myself.” Winning the 100-yard
    dash at Harvard in May, 1891.
]


This hunger for the glamorous and the romantic surely did not come to me
from the staid New England farmers and lawyers whose lives had been
devoted to the stern necessity of grubbing an existence out of the
rather stubborn soil of Maine and Vermont; but, on my mother’s side
there were certain bold Yanks who had sailed the seas on some of the
clipper ships that in those days were built and manned along the coast
of Maine. To my mother then, and through her to some adventurer of the
deep, I owe the fact that I have never in my life wanted to do, and in
truth I never have done, any of the practical, humdrum work of this
extremely practical world, but have remained perfectly content to make
faces at life and earn my living by drawing pictures on the wall.

If I am right in my opinion that these bad habits of mine came to me
from my mother, I must absolve her from the blame of not handing me at
the same time some of her own stern pains to repress them. Whatever her
dreams had been, her realities were practical enough and she was one of
the many victims of one of life’s modest ironies—a woman who gave so
much of herself that the future of her eight children should be what she
wanted it to be that she died, still fighting, instead of ever sharing
in the success we owe so greatly to her.

Success in life is a difficult thing to estimate. My mother, I am
afraid, had little of the thrill of romantic adventure that I knew her
spirit craved. Indeed, so far as I know, she had no time and no desire
to think of herself at all, and she died before she could be sure that
her ambitions for her children would ever be satisfied. Yet I think she
was a successful woman.

My recollections of these days, stimulated by this message in her faded
handwriting, vaguely recall a long line of literary monstrosities of
about the same date, and when my own boys, at about some such absurd
age, showed symptoms of having been bitten by some wandering bacteria of
the drama, I had an advantage over my father and at once recognized the
symptoms. Like other dread diseases I knew this one to be incurable, the
only treatment being to give the patient plenty of nourishing food,
against the time when he will have difficulty in getting it for himself,
keep him as cheerful as possible, and hope for the worst.

At the time of my first offense I was a member of a flourishing Dramatic
Society and I have a very distinct memory of my rage when at length the
worms turned and one of my fellow members arose at a meeting and firmly
moved the chair that in future the club devote its energies to
performing plays written by some one besides Owen Davis. This was my
first experience of dramatic criticism; my second came some fifteen
years later, fifteen years during which I am afraid I had drifted away
from the worship of the drama and directed myself with equal enthusiasm
to playing ball with such rare and occasional intervals of study as
seemed necessary to preserve the peace.

The theater seemed very far away. My father at that time was the
president of the Society of American Iron Manufacturers and had a small
furnace at Kathodin Iron Works, a settlement in the Maine woods about
fifty miles above Bangor; and after considerable conflict I was
persuaded by my father that I had the makings in me of a great mining
engineer. If I had not already stated that my sense of humor came to me
from my mother’s side, this would be a good place to bring it in.

When I was about fifteen, my father’s business took him to the
Cumberland Mountains in the southern part of Kentucky and he took my
mother and the younger children with him, sending my elder brother to
Massachusetts Tech and me to Harvard. In 1889 there was no School of the
Drama in Harvard, but I can’t recall that there was any great yearning
on my part for one. For some queer reason the memory of the years I
spent there is vague and shadowy. I was not old enough at the time to
get the benefits of a great university, and, aside from the fact of
being a fair football player and a very fast hundred-yard sprinter, I
did little to distinguish myself.

I was a wretched scholar; neither at that time nor at any other have I
ever been able to do anything unless it happened to be the one thing I
wanted to do, and I can’t recall that a high grade in any of my studies
was at any time one of my ambitions. I went to the Boston theaters
whenever I had money enough to get there and I saw all of the great
plays and all of the actors of the day, but I worshiped them from a
distance and had long ago ceased to hope that my life could in any way
be devoted to anything aside from mining engineering. But as I have
never been able to understand the simplest scientific problem and still
retain a bland uncertainty as to how many times three goes in nine, I
doubt if the engineering profession lost much when I later reverted to
type.

My only adventure in the theater during these years was as a member of
what was called “The Society of Arts” which was, I think, the very first
art group to undertake to elevate the drama in America. For some reason
I have a perfectly distinct recollection of this weighty and august
group, although I can’t for the life of me remember what I was doing in
it. The society was organized by Harvard professors and the
distinguished group of men of letters who at that time brought glory to
Cambridge and Boston.

A large sum of money was raised, a fine company of actors engaged, and a
month’s rental of the Hollis Street Theatre, Boston, secured. We
produced four plays, not written by ordinary playwrights but the product
of real literary masters; one by William Dean Howells, one by Frank R.
Stockton and the others by famous writers of equal standing. The company
was headed by Maurice Barrymore and his wife, and everything was done to
attract the “lovers of a better drama” in Boston. But the “lovers of a
better drama” in Boston were as scarce in 1890 as they are to-day, and
the venture was never a success.


[Illustration:

  GUS HILL
  Champion Club Swinger
]


[Illustration:

  MAURICE BARRYMORE
  (_Photograph by Sarony. From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


It was a long time ago and my memory is vague as to the merits of our
performances, but I do recall one passing comment. Toward the end of the
third week the head usher came to me with the news that “all the ushers
have quit, and I don’t know what we’ll do about showing people to their
seats, if there are any people to show to their seats.” I asked him the
reason for this sudden desertion on the part of our ushers and he
informed me curtly that “they couldn’t stand the —— —— shows!”

I don’t remember that I greatly mourned the passing of America’s first
art group in the theater and I loafed along pleasantly enough during my
years in Cambridge, winning some glory on the running track and trying
to make up for my lack of age and weight, both of which at that time
told heavily against me on the football field. By some odd freak I took
few of the courses in English and wrote nothing at all, my only advance
in any of the fine arts being a training as a draw-poker player, an
accomplishment I have never ceased to be grateful for to the great
university where I secured so solid and lasting a technique.

I was tremendously influenced at this time by Phillips Brooks, who still
stands in my memory as the greatest American I have ever known, and I
grew so fond of Professor N. S. Shaler, a grand figure both as a man and
a scientist, that I took every one of his courses in paleontology
without ever gaining the most remote idea of what they were all about.

Quite without ambition and with no definite objective at all I drifted
along until, in the summer of 1903, I found myself working for a coal
mining company in which my father was interested, in the Cumberland
Mountains. I was even a worse mining engineer than I had ever hoped to
be and was extravagantly overpaid by my salary of forty dollars a month.
I am sure that I, at the time, never considered myself worth any more,
but I found it difficult to save out of that forty a month a sum of
money large enough to gratify the first great ambition of my life. It
came to me suddenly, the very day I went to work in the coal business
and consisted of a deep determination to get out of it with the least
possible delay.

Aside from the fact that the glamorous title of a mining engineer turned
out to be just another name for a guy who dug holes in the ground, I
simply detested the dirty little southern town in which I found myself.
Also, as I happened to start my work on the very day the Debs strike
started, I added fear for my life to my other reason for a prompt
withdrawal. There I had to remain, however, all during the riots and
shootings and murders of the great strike, and the town I lived in was
sometimes held by the strikers, and sometimes by the Kentucky State
Troops. On occasion both sides were forced to withdraw for a time, as
this part of the mountains had long been reserved as a battleground by
the Hatfield and McCoy factions, whose feud, arising out of the fact
that some young lady of the generation before had looked funny in a hoop
skirt, had resulted in the death, with their boots on, of many more
worthy citizens than the entire population of the town in my day. Being
even then of a strictly impersonal nature, I didn’t in the least care
whether the McCoys killed the Hatfields or the strikers killed the state
troops. It didn’t seem to be my party. All I wanted was a ticket to New
York.

I knew that I could expect no help from my father. He had, for the
moment, lost all of his money. It was his habit to make and lose
considerable fortunes with the rapidity and nonchalance of a Wilkins
Micawber, and this was one of the times when, like Micawber, he was
waiting for something to turn up. My father was, I am sure, the sweetest
and gentlest and one of the ablest men I have ever known—and I am
equally sure he was the worst business man. I don’t know how many months
it took me to save the railroad fare to New York, but I know that I
arrived there in due time with exactly twelve dollars in my pocket and a
firm determination to conquer the theater, either as a writer or as an
actor.

I was indifferent. Let fate decide. Fate, however, had pretty well
decided as I was never, as we say in Hollywood, “just the type” for
romantic juveniles, having always been about the same distance around as
I was up and down, and so I made a final decision to attack as a
dramatist. And when I say that in the thirty odd years since then I have
had more fun than any man in the world, I am prepared to defend my boast
against doubters either on foot or on horseback. If life has taught me
anything at all, it is that round pegs belong in round holes and that
the one great happiness is to be doing the thing one loves to do.


[Illustration:

  Fanny Janauschek as Medea. “The last of the really great actors of the
    romantic school.”
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


[Illustration:

  Lawrence Barrett as Count Lanciotto in Francesca da Rimini
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


Twelve dollars is not a large capital for an unknown boy, quite without
friends, thrown upon his own resources in New York, and I am willing to
admit that at fifty-six I should scream with terror at what at
twenty-two seemed to me to be a glorious adventure.

A. M. Palmer was at that time one of the leading New York managers and
after many attempts I succeeded in persuading him to read a play I had
written. Fortunately no copy of this drama remains in existence. It was,
according to my vague memory, a very terrible affair. But Mr. Palmer,
who was a sort of Christopher Columbus of his time, seemed to discover
in it some germ of promise, and as in spite of some months of experience
I still found it difficult to live without eating, he offered to make me
an actor until such time as I was able to live by writing. He put me
with an all-star cast supporting Madame Janauschek, the last of the
really great tragic actors of the romantic school.

This company contained such well-known artists as Blanche Walsh, W. H.
Thompson, Annie Yeamans, Fred Bond, Orin Johnstone, Joseph Whiting,
George C. Boniface, Sr., and many others, and opened in rather a bad
melodrama called THE GREAT DIAMOND ROBBERY, a vehicle quite unworthy of
the really great talents of Janauschek who was, in some ways, the finest
actress I have ever known. She had been a friend of the very great in
Europe, and had come so near to being an actual queen that much of the
manner of royalty still clung to her. When I knew her she was short and
dumpy and old but in her presence one had the feeling of the latent
power and fire of this remarkable woman and a sense of the pity and
irony of her slow decay.

My duties as a member of her company had at least the spice of variety,
as I played five parts in the play, was assistant stage manager and had
the added privilege of sitting at the gallery door for an hour before
each performance to count the number of persons who entered, as it was a
playful custom of the day for the owner of the theater to sell about
twice as many gallery tickets as were found in the box when the count
was made. For these duties I was rewarded by the rather small salary of
twelve dollars a week, and although twelve dollars went further in those
days than they do now, they never seemed quite to reach from one
Saturday night to the next one.

I played with this company for its run in New York and continued with it
for a long road season. The road in those days took in all of the
principal towns of the country and, as Janauschek was an established
favorite, we did a good business everywhere. My twelve dollars a week
that probably wouldn’t pay for a room to-day was with a little
stretching enough for a decent living, although by the end of each week
I was driven to borrowing the morning papers for the want of the two
cents necessary to purchase them.

At that time one could live for a week at the second best hotel in any
city for ten dollars and a half, room, bath and food. Ten dollars and a
half, however, was far beyond me and I usually found possible enough
accommodations for about eight dollars. The company made many night
journeys, but, as I remember it, the expense of sleeping-car berths
never worried me. I solved that problem by turning up the collar of my
coat, resting my head on my shabby old suit case and stretching myself
out on two seats of a smoking car. I had seen little of the country at
that time and each new town we came to was a fresh adventure. I loved
the life and from the first I never had a doubt but what it was to be
mine for the rest of my life. I was sincere in my ambition to become a
playwright and at the close of the season I struck out boldly toward
that goal. The fact that I was inclined to decide upon play writing
rather than acting may have been partly influenced by a parting scene I
had with Madame Janauschek the last day of our season.

Janauschek had been extremely kind to me in her rather queeny way and
summoned me to her presence at her apartments in one of the great
Chicago hotels for a word of parting and advice. After a few formal
words in her broken English she presented me with a small photograph of
herself on which she had written a gracious message in her native
German. She then led me to the door, kissed me firmly on the forehead
and said: “Young man—neffer again be an actor,” and pushed me out into
the hall and closed the door.

The closing of the season and some inward agreement with Madame’s
verdict ended my attempts at acting except for one or two occasions when
I was forced by some great emergency to jump into some part to save a
performance and one dreadful time, of which I will speak later, when
stern necessity seemed to be facing me. Two of the occasions when I had
to become an actor or close a theater are fresh in my memory.

During its second season my play THROUGH THE BREAKERS was booked to open
in Jersey City with a holiday matinée. Unfortunately the worst blizzard
of twenty years had been raging and at matinée time several of the
company had been unable to cross the river. I was the company manager
and after switching the cast about as much as possible I found that the
only way to give a performance at all was for me to go on and play the
part of the rough and villainous sailor. Reluctantly I decided to go
through with it, and did so to the best of my ability. By evening the
storm was over and the company were all on hand and, during the
extremely melodramatic second act I stood in the rear of the darkened
theater and watched the performance. It was just at the height of the
villainous sailor’s most villainous moment when the head usher, who
happened to be beside me, whispered: “That ain’t the same man who played
the old sailor this afternoon.” “No,” I answered, “it isn’t.” “I thought
it wasn’t,” replied the usher, “seems to me he’s a damned sight better.”

[Illustration:

  SALLY COHEN, 1898
  With Rice, one of the “favorite entertainers of vaudeville and musical
    comedy.”
  (_Courtesy of The Players_)
]


The other occasion of which I wrote—and, come to think of it, my last
appearance as an actor on any stage—was in a musical comedy I concocted
about twenty-five years ago for John C. Rice and Sally Cohen, then and
for many years afterwards favorite entertainers of vaudeville and
musical comedy. Saturday night of the first week of the play John Rice
came to me and in a hoarse whisper informed me he had completely lost
his voice, a fact that was only too evident to any one who witnessed his
distress in trying to speak above a whisper. The house was sold out and
I owned a third of the show, so it required very little persuasion from
the local theater manager to induce me to take a chance. Sally Cohen
was, I think, the first to propose that I take her famous husband’s
part, and I distinctly recall that the only thing that prevented John
Rice from absolutely forbidding it was the fact that by that time he was
quite incapable of making any sound at all and could only protest by
frantic signs and facial contortions.


[Illustration:

  JOHN C. RICE, 1896
  (_Courtesy of The Players_)
]


At first the fact that Rice was one of the greatest dancers living and
that he had six songs to sing rather dampened my confidence, not only
because I didn’t know either the songs or the dance steps, but because I
never sang a song or danced a step in my life. Little obstacles,
however, never troubled me in those days, and although I was three
inches shorter and fifty pounds heavier than Rice I calmly arrayed
myself in his opening costume and rang the curtain up. About all I
remember of that night is that we got the money, although for years
afterwards whenever I chanced to meet that local manager he fell into a
violent fit of laughter, the cause of which he was never satisfactorily
able to explain.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            ────────────────
                   CHAPTER II ◆ SELLING THE FIRST ONE
                            ────────────────


Although I am rambling about a little ahead of my story the reader will
have observed that by this time I had crossed the Rubicon and had sold
my first play and was steaming ahead at full speed. Very few weeks pass
during which I am not asked “how to sell a first play” and for the
benefit of all would-be dramatists I propose to pause here and answer
this question for all time by giving a brief description of how I sold
mine.

I had no money at all and absolutely no idea of who the managers were or
how to approach them, but I had a play, or at least I had an amazing
number of perfectly good words neatly set down on paper, and I started
boldly out on my quest. This quest proved as it almost always does an
unbelievably long and difficult one. Luck favored me by bringing about a
chance meeting on Broadway with an old friend, the captain of the
Harvard varsity football team on which I had been a substitute, and
through him I managed to land the job of coaching the football squad of
a New York prep school at a salary of fifty dollars a month. So the food
and shelter problem was solved for the next few months. But all good
things, even football seasons, come to an end, and before I had
discovered, first, that no one would read my play, and, second, that it
was absolutely not worth reading anyway, I had some hard knocks and some
rather dire experiences. At length I made up my mind that possibly the
reason I couldn’t sell my play was because it was a bad one and I
started another, but stern necessity was knocking hard and loud and in a
moment of discouragement I made up my mind to again become an actor. A
kind Providence, however, saved me from this fate, although at the
moment I was tempted to doubt its kindness.

I wrote a letter to the late James O’Neill, who as usual was rehearsing
his company at his home in New London; some mention of my experience at
Harvard caught O’Neill’s eye and he wrote me to join the company at New
London, but he evidently did not think it necessary to enclose
transportation to a worthy Harvard graduate. I arrived in New London one
beautiful August day in 1898 or thereabouts with a capital of ninety
cents, and was asked by Mr. O’Neill to memorize six parts in the various
plays he was to do that season, and to read one of them, the part of the
juvenile lead in VIRGINIOS to him the following morning. To this day
when things are breaking very badly for me I am haunted by some of these
terrible lines: “Spread the news in every corner of the city, and let no
man who calls himself a son of Rome stand aside when tyranny assails its
fairest daughter.” O’Neill listened to my reading of the part and
swallowed hard and remarked that “I still needed a little work,” and
then made me the princely offer of twenty dollars a week for the season
if I would buy seven hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of costumes for
the parts. At that it was my turn to swallow hard as my ninety cents had
shrunk considerably during the last twenty-four hours, but I managed to
stammer out that I’d think it over and let him know.


[Illustration:

  “O’Neill listened to my reading of the part.”
  (_A caricature by Fornaro. From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


[Illustration:

  Edwin Booth as Richelieu
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


Mr. O’Neill went into town to spend the evening leaving me seated on a
rock busy with a mathematical problem, and as I never was a great
mathematician I sat there on that rock until twelve o’clock that night
trying to figure out how to expand the remains of my ninety cents to
cover seven hundred and fifty dollars for costumes and enough over to
live on for five weeks before my salary was to start. It was a difficult
problem, but I still think if I had been given a little more time I
would have solved it. I was interrupted, however, by the sound of voices
approaching in the night. Mr. O’Neill’s home was in a secluded spot. On
one side of it ran the raised tracks of the New Haven railroad. In the
house at that moment young Eugene O’Neill was sleeping in his crib. At
the sound of voices I looked up, my problem still unsolved. Its solution
came very suddenly. Mr. O’Neill, returning along the raised railroad
tracks, stubbed his toe and fell through an open culvert and landed at
my feet with both his legs broken. I left New London the next day. I
have often been back since that night, but my watch is still there.

Had I known as much in those days as I now know of the enormous
difficulties ahead of me it is possible that I might have feared them,
but at the time my confidence was more developed than my prudence and I
had no fear at all. This is, of course, the usual attitude of youth. The
obstacles ahead that seem like mountains to the experience of middle age
are only mole hills to a young man of twenty odd who quite expects to
leap over them without a change of stride.

Yet I doubt if any undertaking in the world is any more difficult than
that of one who elects to make a living as a dramatist. He must win his
place and then he must hold it, and of the two the last is really the
most difficult. The late Charles Kline told me just before his death
that the most pitiful thing in the world was a playwright who had
written a big success and learned enough of the difficulties of doing it
to feel absolutely convinced that there wasn’t the slightest chance of
his ever being able to do it again. Every young playwright must put up
with a number of things that cut deep into a sensitive nature and leave
scars that never quite die away. Many men and women of talent, who might
have developed into fine writers for the theater find themselves too
sensitive for the harsh contacts and give up in despair. The hours of
waiting in managers’ offices, ignored and unwelcome, the contemptuous
acceptance of plays to be read that are ultimately glanced over by an
office boy and scornfully rejected, are all a part of the game.

I took one of my first plays to the Frohman office. What happened to it
there was, or at least I thought it was, a matter of life or death to
me. I had no money at all and during the five weeks I was waiting for a
verdict I sold what few clothes I had left, piece by piece, to pay my
three dollars a week room rent and spent thirty cents a day for food. At
last I was ushered into the presence of the play reader, later one of
the great men of the theater, who met me with this encouraging speech:
“You are,” he said, “a strong and husky young man, with, so I have
heard, some reputation as an athlete. Why don’t you take this play of
yours and see how far you can throw it?” This was hardly a tactful
rejection, and as it turned out rather a silly one, as the play in
question some years later made a very reasonable success.

One must be prepared for this sort of thing and resolute enough to
thrive on it, as success very rarely comes upon a young playwright very
suddenly. It doesn’t sneak up behind one and thrust fame and fortune
into one’s lap, fame and fortune being very timid birds, more likely to
fall into the lap of the one who goes out after them with a gun than to
the dreamer who sits at home and waits patiently. In my experience
patient waiting never got anybody anything. All the prizes worth having
are for the daring—the one who sits and waits never got anything—except
fat.

A dramatist isn’t a dramatist at all until he has had a play produced,
no matter how many plays he may have written, and he must get that first
production at any cost. It is natural enough that the managers should
hesitate before purchasing the play of an untried writer, especially as
there are only a few of them who themselves know enough about a play to
have any real confidence in their own reaction. The successful author,
of course, has a great advantage, and a man with one or two hits to his
credit can get a pretty bad play accepted. Yet Mr. Shaw’s observation
that “If it’s by a good writer it’s a good play” doesn’t mean quite as
much as it used to, since the critic of late has developed a rather
alarming habit of eagerly leaping at the throat of the man who is
obviously trading on an established reputation and trying to get away
with careless and sloppy work.

In some ways it is, I think, more difficult for a beginner to-day than
it was in my youth. In those days almost any play that got itself
produced made some money for its author and any honest writer of long
experience would own up to considerable sums made from plays that cost
their producers a lot of money. To-day, however, plays die quickly and a
failure means that the writer gets little, if anything, more than the
trifling sum of his advance, which is seldom over five hundred and
almost never, in America, over one thousand dollars. The pleasant old
custom of a manager keeping a young writer’s bad plays running long
enough for the writer to live comfortably until he learned how to write
a better one has passed along with the other nice old romantic notions
and to-day he has to hit it the first time or walk the plank.


[Illustration:

  CHARLES FROHMAN
  “I took one of my first plays to the Frohman office.”
  (_From a caricature in the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


It is, naturally enough, about as difficult for the beginner to learn
how to write without any real chance of slowly and gradually learning
his business as it is for the young actor of to-day to learn how to act
without any real experience in acting; he lacks the training of the good
stock companies of twenty years ago, or of the classic drama where he
had to play many small parts before he was ever trusted with a big one.
He is asked now to play any part he can look, and is given leading parts
to play and fails in them more from lack of experience than from lack of
talent. This doesn’t in the least mean that I think the acting of
twenty-five years ago was better than the acting of to-day, because I
know better. The lack of the training of the old days is unfortunate,
but the change in method more than makes up for it, and although at
present we have few great actors we have a tremendous supply of very
competent ones. Although at this writing too many of them are in
Hollywood, we can still find a good cast far more easily than we can
find a good play, and there are still far too many promising young
actors unable to get a chance to prove their worth. But their problem is
simple compared to the problem of the young playwright, now or twenty
years ago.


[Illustration:

  HARRIGAN AND HART
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


Each generation, I suppose, has its own problems, but the problem of the
one starting out to win a place in a crowded and difficult profession is
never easily solved. It is well, however, to remember that all these
fences built up in front of us to hold us back remain firmly standing
after we have managed to scramble over them and they keep on blocking
the road and give a little breathing time to those who have succeeded in
getting a start.

It’s a tough game any way you figure it, and it’s a queer, lonely and
depressing existence. A young writer must do it all himself and usually
against the advice and the doubts of his acquaintances. He must run
around New York with that first play under his arm until both his feet
and his heart are sore, and he rarely meets any one who takes the
slightest interest in it. Nobody has any faith or confidence in him;
probably he has very little money—I very distinctly remember that I had
none at all—he will very likely be as hungry and lonely and frightened
as I was. But if the play under that young writer’s arm is a real
play—and every once in a while it is—he is not a half starved lonely
vagrant but a prince on a masquerade. He doesn’t know it; the cold and
half contemptuous clerks and secretaries he meets can’t see through his
disguise, but he is a bigger man than any of these who snub him and
outranks the best of them. Soon his time will come—“The King is dead.
Long live the King.” At the time I started, however, I knew nothing at
all of what was ahead of me, and had, as I recall it, few doubts and no
misgivings.

Fate having thrust me back into the ranks of the dramatists I have never
again dared to desert and devoted my efforts only to play writing,
although at odd times, driven by financial or business necessity, I have
served in all the branches of the theater, having worked as actor, stage
manager, stage director, treasurer, box-office man, advance agent, play
doctor, dramatist, business manager, partner in plays of my own and of
other writers, as well as in later years serving a rather varied
apprenticeship in the motion picture studios both in New York and in
California.

Determined to sell this first play of mine I approached at this time the
firm of Davis and Keough and tried to sell them a romantic costume drama
dealing with the Wars of the Roses. When Mr. Keough got through
laughing, he asked me to go that night to see a play he had just
produced called THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and to call on him the next day.
When I called he asked me if “I thought I could write a play like that.”
I replied that I thought anybody could, but didn’t see why they should.
But when he told me that he would give me five hundred dollars if I
wrote one he liked, I rushed back to my furnished room and went to work.
I am sure the play I wrote was almost as bad as the one he sent me to
see, but for some deep managerial reason he couldn’t see it and told me
to go away and stop bothering him. The Davis and Keough melodrama,
however, had made me think. I had seen that the theater had been crowded
with an audience that responded tremendously to the crude plot and the
rather obvious situations and, as I had told Mr. Keough, it had seemed
to me to be a simple formula to acquire. Later investigation convinced
me that this formula was capable of some expansion without loss to its
effectiveness and I began a rather more scientific study of this form of
play manufacture than had ever before seemed necessary to any of the
writers who had been engaged in it.

As a result of this study I soon evolved a rather mechanical but really
effective mold that served me in the writing of more than one hundred
and fifty of these melodramas with an average of success that seems
startling to me as I look back upon it. Charles Dickens had beaten me to
the trick and of course many others have used it, but as a labor-saving
device it served me well. It had always seemed to me that Dickens’s
stories fell very readily into three molds: one represented by THE TALE
OF TWO CITIES, one by DAVID COPPERFIELD and one by the strictly humorous
type represented by THE PICKWICK PAPERS. I therefore devised my molds,
in my case represented by such western thrillers as THE GAMBLER OF THE
WEST, the second type the New York comedy-drama represented by CHINATOWN
CHARLIE and BROADWAY AFTER DARK, and the last group of what Hollywood
would call the “sexy” type, illustrated by NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK
MODEL and a long string of her persecuted and unfortunate sisters.

It took me some months to figure all this out and to experiment with my
different forms, months of very hard work, as I wrote all day and every
night went to the fifteen-cent gallery of one of the popular-priced
houses, making a real study, not of the plays but of the audiences. When
the very hard-boiled gentleman who sat next to me wept or laughed or
applauded, I wasn’t at first always sure of his reason, my duller mind
not at that time responding to the sentimental dramatic or comedy cue as
quickly as his trained intelligence, and I made a point of falling into
conversation with my neighbors in an effort to share as fully in the
delight of those present as was possible for an unfortunate inhibited by
a Harvard background.

After a time, trained by my comrades in the packed and poorly ventilated
galleries, I found myself thrilling with delight to the noble if
somewhat banal sentiment of such good old phrases as: “Rags are royal
raiment when worn for virtue’s sake,” and taking the utmost satisfaction
in the retribution that always followed the villain and in the sweet,
and somewhat sticky, rewards of those whose feet had never strayed from
the straight and narrow path. Of course life was never like that, but
just as obviously it ought to be, and to the dull lives of the working
people of thirty-five years ago these absurd dramas of ours brought
almost their only glimpse of romance.

The old melodramas were practically motion pictures, as one of the first
tricks I learned was that my plays must be written for an audience who,
owing to the huge, uncarpeted, noisy theaters, couldn’t always hear the
words and who, a large percentage of them having only recently landed in
America, couldn’t have understood them in any case. I therefore wrote
for the eye rather than the ear and played out each emotion in action,
depending on my dialogue only for the noble sentiments so dear to
audiences of that class.

With my mind made up to a conquest of the sensational melodrama field I
worked hard on my first script and in the course of time had it ready.
Curiously enough I had turned out a good play, rather above the usual
specimen of its kind, and as a matter of fact one of the most honest and
complete successes I have ever had. I knew little of its worth at the
time, but I liked the thing, not unusual in a young dramatist, and I
made up my mind to have it produced. To that end I made up a list of
theatrical managers starting with the A’s and ending with the X’s and
set out to call on all of them.

I don’t remember much about the A’s but the B’s were led by the name of
William A. Brady. For a week I called at his office daily with my play
under my arm. There seemed to be a certain vagueness among Mr. Brady’s
clerks as to when he could be seen and after five or six days I ventured
to ask one of them where Mr. Brady was, to be met with the heart-felt
answer: “I wish to God I knew.” Which goes to prove after all how slight
are the changes the years bring.

Pursuing my alphabetical course, I came at last to the H’s and found the
name of “Gus Hill.” After diligent inquiry I discovered that Gus Hill
was the manager of “Gus Hill’s Stars,” at that time holding forth in a
burlesque theater in Brooklyn. The day before the D’s having failed me
in the person of the late Augustin Daly, I started for Brooklyn and Gus
Hill. I asked for Mr. Hill at the stage door of the Star Theatre and was
pointed out his dressing room and told that Mr. Hill was “in there.” I
knocked somewhat timidly at this door and a voice called “Come in,” and
I entered to see a slight, blond, pleasant-looking man, quite naked, who
was rubbing himself down with a towel. I later learned that Mr. Gus Hill
was at that time the “Champion Club Swinger of the World” and that he
had just finished his usual stunt of swinging great clubs several times
larger than himself.


[Illustration:

  “The B’s were led by the name of William A. Brady”
  (_Photo by White Studio_)
]


[Illustration:

  “Henry Miller was ... the greatest teacher of acting I have ever
    known.”
  (_Photo by Arnold Genthe_)
]


As this turned out to be the critical moment of my life, pardon me if I
drop into the dialogue form in an attempt to do it justice. Mad as the
following may seem, it is true to the very last word. This is what
actually took place between a very much embarrassed youth and a bland,
blond, smiling and quite naked gentleman named Gus Hill:


                                 SCENE


Gus Hill’s Dressing Room in Star Theatre, Brooklyn.


                               CHARACTERS


GUS HILL, thirty-five, a slight man of extraordinarily powerful frame,
good-natured, smiling, costume absolutely none.

OWEN DAVIS, twenty-four, stout, a bit shy. Costume—the only one he had.

[_As the curtain rises_, GUS HILL _is discovered rubbing himself down
with the contents of a bottle on the label of which we read the words
“For Man or Beast.” There is a timid knock on the door and_ GUS HILL
_calls_:]

                                  HILL

Come in! [_The knock is repeated and again he calls_:] Come in you ——
fool! [_The door opens and_ DAVIS _enters timidly and looks a bit
impressed as he takes in the scene_.]

[_Note: At this time_ DAVIS _was not hardened to managers and could
still be impressed_.]

                                  HILL
                             [_Pleasantly_]

Who are you?

                                 DAVIS

Er—Er—I’m—er—an author.

                                  HILL

The hell you are? Do you know you’re the first one of ’em I ever saw
this close. What do you want?

                                 DAVIS

Er—well—I thought I—er—I’d like to have you produce my play.

                                  HILL

All right, sit down on the trunk.

                                 DAVIS
                              [_On trunk_]

Well—er—that is—er—What I mean is I’d like to have you produce my play.

                                  HILL

What the hell is the matter with you? Didn’t I tell you “all right”?

                                 DAVIS

Yes, sir—what I mean is—I—er—I was wondering if—if you’d mind very much
if I was to read you my play?

                                  HILL

If I keep on in this game I suppose I may have to come to that, but
right now I wouldn’t know anything about it. I’m looking for a play and
you say you’ve got one—what’s the answer?

                                 DAVIS

Yes, sir—er—what I mean is—I came here—that is I’d very much like to
have you produce my play.

                                  HILL

——! If you keep on talking long enough I’m ——! ——! sure I won’t, let’s
fix it up quick. How much do you want for it?

                                 DAVIS

Well—er—as a matter of fact I don’t quite know. You see, to tell you the
truth, this—er—er—this is the first time I ever sold a play if—if this
is a time.

                                  HILL

Don’t you know what they sell for?

                                 DAVIS

Er—No, sir.

                                  HILL

You’re a hell of an author.

                                 DAVIS

Er—yes, sir.

                                  HILL

I tell you what, I’ll give you fifty dollars a week and put up all the
money. Then, after I got it back, if and when, I’ll give you one-third
of all the play makes. What do you think of that?

                                 DAVIS

I don’t believe it.

                                  HILL
                            [_Thoughtfully_]

I’ve heard it said that some guys could write pretty good plays when to
look at ’em you’d wonder how they did it! When we do our play who’s
going to hire the actors and get the scenery and rehearse it?

                                 DAVIS
                               [_Calmly_]

I am.

                                  HILL

Do you know how?

                                 DAVIS

Er—er—I—I hope so.

                                  HILL
                               [_Sadly_]

Yes—so do I.

                              END OF SCENE


This was my introduction to Gus Hill and a true account of how my first
play was placed for production. The play was a melodrama called THROUGH
THE BREAKERS and it ran for five years in the popular-priced theaters of
America and was produced in England, Australia and South Africa with
real success. In spite of Mr. Hill’s quite natural doubts, I did all of
the things I told him I would do, and by some kind of luck or fate, or
by the aid of a really tremendous enthusiasm that has always been my one
claim to anything unusual in the way of talent, I got the play on the
stage and gave a really good performance.

The first matinée of THROUGH THE BREAKERS was the occasion of the second
dramatic criticism to which I alluded some half mile back in this
rambling narrative. The play was produced in Bridgeport, Conn., and the
morning papers had been very flattering in their account of the first
performance of this first born child of mine. I was standing at the back
of the theater during the matinée listening with rapture to my words,
and in all the world there is no listening to equal a young author’s,
when my bliss was rudely shattered by a low-voiced comment from a
gentleman with a dirty collar who sat in the last row. “I have,”
remarked this gentleman to his companion, “seen a lot of shows in my
time, but this is probably the rottenest —— —— —— —— —— of a show I have
ever seen!”

Even in those days I was a meek and quiet and extremely reasonable man
so I merely smiled and bent over the railing and touched the gentleman
with the dirty collar on the shoulder and whispered softly: “Excuse me,
but there is a message for you outside.” After some persuasion I
convinced the gentleman that “some one outside” was asking for him and
he followed me willingly enough to the front door. The theater, luckily,
was what used to be called an “upstairs house” and twenty-five or thirty
steps led gently down to the street. As we approached the head of this
stairway, still smiling I drew back my arm and hit the astonished critic
a snappy uppercut that tumbled him all the way to the sidewalk, then
returned to my pleasant duty of listening to my own words.

This story was noised abroad during the next fifteen or twenty years and
was once used by Alexander Woollcott in an article; used, as I recall
it, by him to explain some favorable notice he had written of one of my
plays.

In justice to myself, however, I must pause here to say that I have been
called worse things than the man with the dirty collar called me by many
critics who are still alive and healthy. As a matter of fact I honestly
think that critics in the end are rarely unfair, and very seldom wrong.
It is an absurdity to say that they ever make or break a play. A good
play is a very sturdy and very important force in itself, of far more
importance than the opinion of any critic, and in the end it lives or
dies because it’s good or because it isn’t. Critics can, and have, made
a bad play live for a short time, but they never killed a good one—and
what’s more, they never wanted to. I have never been an especial pet of
dramatic critics, my somewhat spectacular career not exactly fitting
with their idea of the proper dignity of a dramatist. Yet whenever I
have written a really fine play they have been quick and generous in
their praise of it. So I have always felt they had a perfect right to go
after me tooth and nail upon the more frequent occasions when I have
stubbed my toe.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            ────────────────
                       CHAPTER III ◆ THEN AND NOW
                            ────────────────


Dramatic criticism, like all of the other arts having to do with our
theater, has changed, and like the others the change of the last few
years has been for the better. When I first came to New York, William
Winter was by far the outstanding critic, and his opinions were eagerly
waited for and had great influence. I doubt if any critic of to-day is
his equal in some ways, yet the best men of to-day have, I think, a far
greater influence upon the actual writing of plays. In William Winter’s
time the Shakespearian tradition was strong and the plays of modern
writers were of secondary importance. Acting then was more important
than play writing, while to-day the dramatist is the important figure in
almost every production.

I do not in the least mean that acting to-day is any less vital than it
used to be, but the standard of acting and of directing is very much
higher. Very few first class producers who are fortunate enough to
secure a good play are bunglers enough not to take full advantage of it
and we have grown to expect adequate performances and take them quite as
a matter of course. Even ten years ago there were a number of stars who
were sure of some business no matter what play they might appear in, but
I think it is a fair statement that to-day no actor alive can do any
business at all unless the play is satisfactory. In any case it was the
dramatist and not the actor who was responsible for the birth of the new
type of drama in America, and when the writer threw into the discard the
romantic, the heroic and the sentimental, the actor was forced to change
his method. Booth and Jefferson could have played in a modern reticent
play, because they were, in their day, outstanding in the quiet and
normal method they used, but most of the great actors of our theater
would have been lost if they had been deprived of their grand passions
and their carefully developed heroics. Of course these men and women
played in the accepted tradition of their time, and their talents would
have been trained to-day in a different direction. We miss the diction
of the good actor of the old school and his beautifully trained voice,
and his thorough grasp of all the details of his business, but the
characterizations of to-day are far nearer to real life and far less set
and conventional than they were under the old system. When I first went
into the theater, an actor would be handed a part and told that it was,
let us say, “a Sir Francis Levinson.” He would play it that way, and
usually play it very well, but frequently in a rather tryingly cut and
dried manner.

Directing, too, has become very much more important than it used to be,
at least in the sense that there are more good directors, although among
the list of men whom I consider to have been the best directors I have
ever known, several were of the theater of years ago. Augustin Daly was
a master; no man of to-day is any better; for years his company was
quite justly the pride of America. A. M. Palmer was a man of taste and
shrewd knowledge of the theater. He was the first man I ever worked with
and one of the best. Palmer was a man of great cultivation and in his
appearance amazingly different from any of our managers to-day. He was a
very dignified little man who wore a brand of whiskers now quite
obsolete, and his manner always seemed to me to be more suited to the
pulpit than to the stage. He was, I am sure, both a worthy and a deeply
religious man, and it was his custom at the end of the last rehearsal to
stand on the stage, surrounded by his company, and raise his hands in an
attitude of benediction and say: “Ladies and gentlemen—now we are in the
hands of God.” I recall an occasion when he rather spoiled the effect of
this pious observation by turning to the stage electrician and
continuing in the same breath: “And for God’s sake don’t you forget that
first act light cue again.”


[Illustration:

  _A. M. Palmer._
  “The first man I ever worked with and one of the best.”
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


[Illustration:

  “Augustin Daly was a master; no man of to-day is any better.”
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


Charles Hoyt, probably the best farce writer the world has ever known,
was a fine director. All of his plays were built at rehearsal and on the
road before their first New York engagement. It was his custom to engage
a cast of sure-fire comedians and fashion his play around them. He would
call on Tim Murphy, Otis Harlan, May Irwin and actors of that standing,
and start out with his central idea, always an ironic snapshot of some
social or political absurdity. When his play first opened, it would run
at the most about thirty minutes, and each of the performers would be
called upon to sing two or three songs or do their specialty. Out they
would go, usually into New England, in the early spring, and as the days
passed there would be more and more dialogue and fewer and fewer songs,
until in the end the farce would have been written and ready for its New
York opening. Hoyt built in this way A TEXAS STEER, A TRIP TO CHINATOWN,
A RAG BABY, A TIN SOLDIER and several others, all of them sound farces
and all of them very successful.

David Belasco then, as now, was a master of the mechanics of the
theater, and is a man who always has amazed me and won my very honest
admiration. His love of the theater as an institution is, I am sure, as
deep and as real as mine, and his skill and patience and perfection of
detail had a great influence upon the growth of our theater.

Henry Miller was not only a great director, but I think the greatest
teacher of acting I have ever known. Any young actor or actress who
passed through his hands had something behind them. He died as he had
lived, ready for his job—waiting for the curtain to go up—and although I
have never wanted to exchange my own life for any other man’s, I must
admit I am a little envious of Henry Miller’s death.

Charles Frohman knew what he wanted of his company and how to get it,
and Daniel Frohman’s company was always guided by his good taste and
honesty. Daniel Frohman is no longer active as a producer, but he holds,
I think, the first place in the hearts of all of us who work in the
theater. In saying this I am not thinking alone of his work for the
Actors’ Fund, although his work there has been enormously important. But
aside from that his sympathy and his appreciation of all the good work
done by any of us, actor or dramatist, have given courage and joy to a
lot of hard workers who at times were in sore need of both. I know that
among my treasures I have a letter he wrote me just after the production
of ICEBOUND that I value above the Pulitzer Prize that soon followed it.
We of the theater are a close corporation, and we value the praise of
our own people more than we do any opinion from the outside.

Erlanger, the business head of the theater for many years, had a lot to
do with the production of his own plays, and although not a director, he
made his influence felt.

William A. Brady at his best is a truly inspired director, and I have
seen him do work that was fine and true; his ear is almost perfect, and
his sense of the pulse and rhythm of melodrama is absolutely unfailing.
He has faults to offset these virtues, but when he is right, when the
scene he is directing is the kind of scene he knows about, he is a hard
man to beat.

I could go on writing for hours of the many adventures I had with Mr.
Brady, grave and gay, absurd and thrilling, but in all of them there was
at least the virtue of novelty. In all the years I worked with him he
never by any chance did what I expected him to do, and he never did the
same thing twice. After I was through with the popular-priced drama and
was making an effort to get started as a Broadway writer, he was the
first man who had any confidence in me, and he gave me my first chance.

Picking in my mind at random for a story in which Mr. Brady figures, I
am suddenly swamped by the recollection of a hundred. I recall, for
instance, how he and John Cranwell and I worked for five days and six
nights at a dress rehearsal of THE WORLD WE LIVE IN without a break,
living on ham sandwiches and milk and sleeping for half an hour at a
time on a pile of discarded drapery. Our first important play together
was THE FAMILY CUPBOARD. The big scene was a conflict between a son and
his father, in which the boy strikes the father, then, overcome by
horror and remorse, falls sobbing at the father’s feet. Forrest Wynant
was the boy and William Morris the father. Neither Mr. Brady nor I was
satisfied with the progress of the scene, and at length Mr. Brady jumped
up on the stage and brushed Mr. Wynant aside and played the long and
very dramatic scene for him, and ended by falling sobbing at William
Morris’s feet, absolutely all in from the terrific effort he had made.
As he ended there was a silence—we were all thrilled—Brady lay there
panting and perspiring. Mr. Wynant alone seemed to be unmoved. He looked
down at Mr. Brady’s heaving figure and said earnestly—“Mr. Brady—would
you mind doing that again?”

Some years later, at the dress rehearsal of a mystery play of mine, AT
9.45, John Cranwell and I were alone in the front of the theater. Mr.
Brady was ill at home. The rehearsal was dreadful; there was no pace at
all; it was dead and flat, and I knew that unless some miracle happened
we faced a failure. We had been told not to bother Mr. Brady, but I was
desperate, and without a word to John Cranwell I ran out of the theater
and drove to Mr. Brady’s house, where I dragged him out, almost by
force, sick and surly. He arrived at the theater protesting that he was
a dying man and couldn’t possibly be of any help to me even if he wanted
to, and that he was remarkably sure he didn’t, or words to that effect.
Still grumbling, he stepped through the front door and as he did so his
ear caught the flat note in the performance that had so alarmed me. In
ten seconds he was at the footlights with the entire company following
his tone as an orchestra follows the hand of their conductor, and in two
hours he had set the tempo of the play.

This same AT 9.45 was the only play not closed by the actors’ strike of
eleven years ago; we kept it open—I am sure I don’t know why—and I doubt
if Mr. Brady does. It was, I suppose, because we both of us love a fight
and we had a perfectly grand time in doing a thing that no one else was
able to do. As most of our actors left us at the first demand of their
union, we would have been sunk at once if Mr. Brady had not called for
help, and we built up a cast from some very important actors who were
not in sympathy with the Equity Society. There were, however, very few
of these, and it became necessary for Mr. Brady himself to play the most
difficult part, a butler with a big scene. He played him—big scene and
all—plus the most amazing stage side-whiskers I had seen in many years.
Mr. Brady loved it, whiskers and all, and had the time of his life. I
truly think he was sorry when the strike was ended.

Winthrop Ames was one of the fine stage directors, and although never
especially active in the theater, every production he made was almost
perfect in its detail.

Winchell Smith, the best of the dramatist-directors, knows more theater
than any of us, and has been responsible for a lot of fine work.

James Forbes, Rachel Crothers, George Kelly, Elmer Rice and Frank Craven
are all first rate directors of their own plays. I myself have had a lot
of experience in this work but I am sorry to say that I have one rather
annoying trait as a director. It is so much easier for me to make up a
new play than it is to be bothered by following a manuscript that I am
quite likely to get my company a trifle mixed.

Among the professional directors, Robert Milton is a first class man and
Sam Forrest has skill and great experience. Hugh Ford, who worked with
George Tyler for many years, had probably the longest unbroken string of
successes.

George Abbott, both as a writer, actor and director, brings sanity and
good judgment to every job he undertakes and deserves every bit of his
very unusual success.

Aside from the dramatists who direct their own plays and the free lance
stage directors, there is, of course, Arthur Hopkins, in many ways a
better man than any of us. He does a play because he likes it; it
doesn’t in the least matter to him whether you or I like it or not; he
is absolutely untouched by any man’s opinion but his own, and surely no
one man in our theater has done so much fine work or done it with a
higher motive. He saw beauty in it—no other reason ever did or ever will
make him produce a play.

George Tyler, John Golden and Sam Harris are managers who are
constructive in their attitude to authors and many of their successes
have been due to their sympathetic attitude toward the authors with whom
they work.

George Cohan is a great director and a remarkable play-doctor, but of
late his own plays have taken most of his time.

Jed Harris seems to me to be a truly remarkable editor. I have never
seen him direct a play, but I have talked plays with him, and if I am
any judge of plays he knows a lot about them. He has gone far already
for so young a man, but he will go further.

Reuben Marmoulain and Chester Erskine are among the new men. Both of
them have something.

There are other good directors, of course. Just at present I have been
writing only of the men I knew.

The theater of the nineties, even the first class theater, was very
different from what it is to-day and the difference, of course, was due
to the difference in our audiences. The stage always reflects the times
and one could easily enough get a mental picture of any period or of any
civilization by a careful study of ten or a dozen successful dramas and
comedies of the day.

America during these years was still dominated by a Puritan tradition
and its drama was based upon a stern Puritan creed and an almost equally
uncomfortable sentimentality. It must be remembered also that at this
time our “melting pot” joke was at its very funniest and every year
hundreds of thousands of foreign born flung themselves upon our
hospitable, if somewhat undiscriminating, shores and each year a good
number of these were joined to our audiences.

The demand was for good acting also rather than for good plays, just as
it is now in the “talkies.” It is, I think, only when the drama has
grown to maturity that the focus shifts from the player to the play.

Bronson Howard was the favorite playwright of New York when I arrived
there, although the growing success of young Augustus Thomas threatened
his supremacy. Edward Harrigan was very popular, both as an actor and a
writer, and deservedly so. The spirit of America has always seemed to me
to have been best reflected by three men, who followed one another and
kept alive a true spirit of the folk play, writing of men and women, of
happenings and emotions of the everyday life around them: William
Harrigan, Charles Hoyt and George Cohan. These three have left very deep
footprints and in the case of George Cohan at least much more than that.
The peculiar comedy style of all of our American playwrights of to-day
was directly founded on his droll staccato and even the very modern
wise-crack has descended from his careless impudence.


[Illustration:

  “When I first came to New York William Winter was by far the
    outstanding critic.”
  (_From a photograph taken in 1891. Courtesy of The Players_)
]


[Illustration:

  DAVID BELASCO
  “His love of the theater as an institution is, I am sure, as deep and
    as real as mine.”
  (_Photo by the Misses Colby, N. Y. From the Messmore Kendall
    Collection_)
]


To me it has always been of great interest to watch how the type of
writer, and the type of play changed and progressed with the change in
the character and the standards of our audiences. Only the superficial
observer will claim superiority in the plays of 1890 to the plays of
1910, and since 1910 we have had an almost steady growth in the art of
the serious dramatist, a growth so important that beside it the smudges
of filth spilled by a few unimportant scribblers may very easily be
forgotten. The question of dirt in the theater in any case is no longer
of any real importance. The extreme frankness of modern society, the
freedom with which all sorts of questions are discussed in the home and
in all walks of life, has acted as a complete disinfectant. It was an
extremely easy thing to shock small coins out of a Puritan community but
the man who has skill enough to successfully pander to an
over-sophisticated audience usually has sense enough to use that skill
to better advantage. The censor in the end will disappear, not wholly
because he is no longer needed but because he will be no longer
understood.

My grandfather and his family walked to church every Sunday because to
drive on the Lord’s Day was a sin. I walk four miles around a golf
course every Sunday, and it is probable that my moral standards are as
high as his were.

If I am sure of anything at all, I am sure that I am not my brother’s
keeper, and, deeply as I resent dirt for dirt’s sake in the theater, I
know that the way to end it is not by allowing some one person or some
group of persons to set up their own moral or ethical standard and
compel the rest of the world to abide by it. The professional moralist
soon standardizes his own beliefs just as the professional politician
does, and he never has and never can properly represent the shifting
taste of the majority. Just what may properly be discussed on the stage
or in society varies so greatly with the passing moods of the times that
any fixed and rigid rules soon become fixed and rigid absurdities. I
distinctly recall the extraordinary difficulty my mother had some forty
odd years ago in delicately conveying to us the news that our old dog
was soon to have an increase in her family, and in those days a female
dog was called a female dog, economized speech being at that time
considered to be of less importance than elegance.

I have studied plays all my life and I am sure I don’t know enough about
them to be qualified to act as a censor. I am equally sure that it would
be very difficult to find any man who knows more about them than I do
who would consent to act in that capacity. The temper of our people is
further away to-day than it ever was before from all these laws that try
to compel us all to live according to the beliefs of a handful of
persons who still cling frantically to the old Puritan notion that all
one has to do to abolish sin is to forbid it. The thing that should be
unlawful in the theater is bad taste, and good taste is the result of
education, not of restriction.

Every tendency of our American drama to-day is toward drawing a more
cultivated and more sophisticated audience. The demand of this audience
is for plays that mean something, and as soon as all the dramatists and
all the managers who still seem to be blind to this fact are snugly
relegated to the poor house we shall have no more talk of censorship. I
have never in my life seen a dirty play that has had one-tenth as much
effect upon an audience as many a fine play I could name has had, partly
because the mass reaction of every audience is always healthy, and
partly because fine plays are written by fine dramatists, and dirty
plays are written by incompetent scribblers. The instinctive feeling
that it is a fine thing to be a gentleman that comes from sitting
through one performance of JOURNEY’S END will go much deeper under any
normal skin than any dirty joke heard in an off-color musical show. If I
for one moment thought that the theater had anything at all to do with
forming the moral tone of a nation, I might have more patience with all
this talk of political and national censorship, but I know better. The
theater reflects that tone, it does not guide it.

I have the masculine man’s contempt for dirty plays, arising, I suppose,
from the fact that masculine men never write them. Dirty plays are
always written either by women or by effeminate men, and always have
been. There is, of course, a pathological reason for this, but the fact
remains that the normal and healthy male is not especially interested in
the eavesdropping of the servants’ hall, and, although he may offend by
bluntness and lack of taste, he is seldom downright nasty.

I hope that no one who reads these rather rambling notes of mine will
think that I have any desire to deny the woman playwright any particle
of credit, but I use the word playwright as I use the word actor, to
describe any one who devotes themselves to these arts, either man or
woman. Sex seems rather unimportant to me beside the fact that one can
act or write. Of course some of our fine plays have been written by
women, and many of the greatest actors the world has ever known have
been of the feminine sex. It would be difficult to name three men who
ranked as actors beside Bernhardt, Duse and Charlotte Cushman, and in
the theater of to-day I dare any one to make a list of five men who
could stand comparison with Mrs. Fiske, Jane Cowl, Pauline Lord, Helen
Hayes and Ethel Barrymore.

Through the nineties Charles Frohman produced a long line of well-made
English dramas, and the Pinero school of expert craftsmen took the place
of the writers of polite melodrama. Charles Kline brought his skill in
bringing forward controversial subjects of timely interest and Clyde
Fitch arrived with his box of parlor tricks. Edward Sheldon came down
from Harvard with about the first authentic message and in him I have
always felt the spark of the true dramatist. Eugene Walter in THE
EASIEST WAY produced the first important American play unless some of
the less widely known of the James A. Hearn plays deserve that rating.
Personally I thought MARGUERITE FLEMING a very fine thing. But THE
EASIEST WAY was a little after the time I have been writing of and my
problem at that moment was to learn a simpler trade.

As it happens, I have lived my personal life rather away from my fellow
workers of the theater, not because I haven’t always valued the
friendship of actors but because I have been a miser of my time. I have
never been much of a club man and nothing at all of a social butterfly.
I am sure that the sight of me, pushed into evening clothes by a stern
wife and perspiring copiously in an effort to conceal my rage and
rebellion, is enough to cast a pall over any social gathering. Even in
Hollywood, where dinner guests may be more readily hired than anywhere
else on earth, I, if I should lose my credit at my hotel, would
undoubtedly starve to death. I have never even been a member of the
Lambs Club and, for no other reason than that by not allowing myself to
get into the habit of having anything to do but my work, I have
naturally gained a good many hours.

During my time as a dramatist, during which I have written between two
and three hundred plays, I have had, if we figure twelve characters to a
play, somewhere around three thousand actors to play these parts.
Naturally I have known all these men and women well and, as I have seen
practically every drama, farce and comedy of any importance at all that
has been produced during all these thirty-five years, I may claim fairly
enough an acquaintance with our American players.

To me there have been a lot of good actors in the world and one mighty
one—unfortunately not an American and more unfortunately already an old
woman when I first saw her—but Sarah Bernhardt had the power to do
something to me that no one else could ever do. I had no critical
judgment of her at all. She spoke, and I listened and believed. Edwin
Booth still seems to me to be the greatest of the others, although a
long way behind the “Divine Sarah.” I saw Booth first as Hamlet during
my second year at Harvard in the winter of 1890. I saw him later with
Modjeska and Otis Skinner in several plays and with Lawrence Barrett the
following year in OTHELLO. He was as simple and as true in his acting as
any of our fine actors of to-day, although the method of his time was
declamatory and artificial. I dimly recall the elder Salvini in some
version of Dr. Bird’s THE GLADIATOR, but I was too young at the time to
carry away any more definite impression than that he had the loudest
voice I had ever heard. Jefferson had great skill and a wonderful
personality and his “Rip,” the model for the Lightnin’ Bills, the Old
Soaks and all of their lovable disreputable brotherhood, remains
towering above them all.

Richard Mansfield I thought very like the little girl who had a little
curl—when he was bad he was awful. In some of her parts, especially in
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW and in a lightweight, imported comedy called THE
LOVE CHASE, I have never seen Ada Rehan’s equal. Janauschek had a real
tragic power, and at her best Modjeska was superb. Just how to place
Maude Adams I have never known, but I do know that she has charmed and
fascinated me so often that I think it only fair to give her the credit
of listing her with the great.

If no names in our theater to-day stand quite so high as these, I think
it is the writer’s fault rather than the actors’, or possibly the fault
of the audiences who have turned away from the romantic play to the grim
and reticent drabness of the naturalistic drama. The glamor and the
sweep of the old declamatory school naturally furnished the actor with a
better chance to score than he has to-day. Then, of course, the great
passions of the romances of thirty years ago find no response in our
audiences. Life is quite as amazing as it ever was but by no means as
mysterious. We have dissected and psychoanalyzed ourselves and one
another past the point where we stand in awe of any one’s “darkened
soul” and advise calomel. Then too our audiences are different; even
thirty years ago thousands of our people thought the theater a place of
evil and were convinced that anything that represented romance or the
glamorous was sinful. The death of this notion was a very healthy
symptom and the start toward a sane understanding of life.

As any man of the world knows, the diversions usually listed as sins
gained their following very largely from the free spirits who searched
for forbidden things, the prescribed pleasures being of rather dubious
enchantment. The fact that these stock sins are usually shabby, ugly and
dull was kept a profound secret. If we could convince our young people
that as a usual thing it is more fun to be decent than it is to go
poking about in dark places we would make as great a step forward in our
morals as we have in our drama. After all in both it’s simply a case of
frankness and honesty.

These were the years of the complete control of the theater by the
famous syndicate, Klaw and Erlanger, the Frohmans, Rich and Harris,
Hayman, Nixon and Zimmerman. No longer were we vagabonds and strolling
players. The out of town manager who used to spend his summer standing
on a corner on Fourteenth Street, where his shabby silk hat was his only
office, now had his attractions booked for him by the Klaw and Erlanger
Agency. The syndicate, successful from the first, soon secured control
of practically all of the first class houses in the country and a once
careless, slipshod business became regulated. Thanks to the syndicate
and to Lee Shubert, who alone and unaided challenged this great
organization to battle and fought them so stiff a draw that for years
the spoils were divided between them, authors now began to eat as
regularly as ordinary mortals, and the high-powered motor cars so common
to playwrights to-day can trace their being to this source.

There is no doubt at all that these two great forces in the theater are
responsible for making a business of what had before their time been a
sort of gypsy’s occupation, but unfortunately the fates are rarely
prodigal and the men gifted with the ability to organize an art have
never yet known what to do with it after it is organized. They always
remind me of the cowboy who fought the bear and after getting him down
had to call for help because he was afraid to let go. As a matter of
fact I have wondered of late if there wasn’t such a thing as being too
successful in organization. I have given a lot of time to the welding
together of our Dramatists’ Guild, just as many other playwrights have,
and now we are extremely well organized, with nobody to fight.

The Actors’ Equity is all powerful after years of honest effort, but
more actors are out of work than ever before. It’s a fine thing for the
actor and the writer to be able to enforce fair conditions of
employment, but unfortunately we can’t force the employment itself. A
good job under fair conditions is a great thing, but no job at all isn’t
so good. It may be worth a thought in passing that if we of the two
creative groups in the theater had been as active in working for the
theater itself as we were in fighting for the power of our individual
groups, we might at this writing be better off. Even yet we might, by a
sacrifice of some of the power we have gained, help to bring back
strength to the business that must flourish if we are to flourish. We
need have no fear of the old tyrannies; they have gone forever. When
actors and authors meet their old antagonists, the managers, to-day,
they meet on equal ground and, as my old comrade Gene Buck puts it: “All
false whiskers are off, and everybody comes out from behind the bushes.”

The complete control of the drama in America by the business men of the
theater started at about the time I entered the lists and continued for
about twenty years. Under their rule prosperity came to us and lasted up
to the time when the public became tired of a drama that soon became a
factory product, as was the natural result of a system that put the
business man in control of the creative artist. I have seen this happen
so many times, in so many forms of the amusement business, that it has
grown to be an old story to me.

I am old enough to remember the group of managers who were the leading
producers just before the time of the “syndicate” and I know the
difference in their methods and ideals. Daly, A. M. Palmer, Daniel and
Charles Frohman, and the great stars like Booth, Jefferson, Modjeska,
Fannie Davenport and a few others had a real following both in New York
and on the road; each one of them represented something. The public knew
what to expect if they went to Daly’s Theatre, or to Daniel Frohman’s
Lyceum on Fourth Avenue, just as they knew what to expect of Edwin Booth
or Joe Jefferson. If A. M. Palmer made a production one knew very well
the sort of entertainment that would be offered. From Hoyt or from
Harrigan you knew the type of play that would be presented and took it
or left it as your taste decided.

After the rise to power of the “syndicate” Charles Frohman kept close to
a definite standard, but Booth, Jefferson, Hoyt, Palmer, Harrigan and
Daly were gone, and in their places rose up a new crop of managers, men
of my time, most of them friends of mine, who were more or less timidly
knocking at the door at about the time I was trying to break in. Sam
Harris, when I first knew him, was Terry McGovern’s manager; Al Woods
was an advance agent ahead of a sensational melodrama and known as the
best man in the show business to draw a big opening to a bad play.
Archie Selwyn was an office boy for a firm of play-brokers. Edgar Selwyn
was trying to get a start as an actor and often reminds me of the fact
that when I was casting my first play he came to me for a job and was
met by a very cold reception. If Mr. Selwyn is telling the truth about
this, as he probably is, although I can’t in the least recall the
incident, it goes to show that I still had a lot to learn, because he
was a very good actor, much better, I am sure, than any one I chose
above him.

These young men came into the theater and took important places in it
and rode to fortune on the wave of prosperity that was at its height
during these years. They were joined in time by a younger group, the
Theatre Guild, Arthur Hopkins, and later still Jed Harris, all of whom
had as definite a thing to say as the old group of managers a full
generation before them. In saying it they started the change in popular
taste that meant the end of the commercial theater, and the birth of
what before long will be a theater of taste and intelligence. Men like
George Tyler, Dillingham, Winthrop Ames, Ziegfeld and William A. Brady
had gone on producing their particular type of play and keeping a little
apart from the rest. Way back, however, in 1898, all managers were
mighty men in my eyes, and the least of them was sacred.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            ────────────────
                      CHAPTER IV ◆ “HOLD, VILLAIN”
                            ────────────────


Gus Hill and I, started so prosperously with THROUGH THE BREAKERS, kept
up a very pleasant association for several seasons, and whenever I meet
him now after the passing of more than twenty-five years I am conscious
of a feeling of good will and something that is almost affection. I
wrote several plays for him and one of them, LOST IN THE DESERT, brought
about my meeting with Elizabeth Breyer, a young actress who had been
playing with E. H. Sothern. I with some difficulty persuaded her to
become a member of the LOST IN THE DESERT company, and a few months
later and with much more difficulty persuaded her to become a member of
the Davis family. The last engagement has lasted some twenty-five years
longer than the first and has been much more successful.

LOST IN THE DESERT was to have been a challenge thrown by Mr. Hill and
me straight in the face of Augustin Daly, Belasco and Charles Frohman.
We had made a lot of money with THROUGH THE BREAKERS and one or two
other plays and saw no reason why we shouldn’t spend it. We built a
wonderful production, hired a band of Arab acrobats, trained four
horses, engaged a fine cast and worked very hard, but although the play
wasn’t a failure it never made any money and in the end we lost our
investment.

During the season in which Mr. Hill and I produced LOST IN THE DESERT
which was, I think, my third year as a writer of sensational melodramas,
I had played Syracuse and met Sam, Lee, and Jake Shubert, who had not at
that time invaded New York but were in control of theaters in Syracuse,
Rochester and Utica. They were boys at that time. I was twenty-six and
Lee, the oldest of the Shuberts, was at least two years younger. Sam was
a man of picturesque and colorful personality and had a real taste for
the theater but I always thought the great success of these young men
was due to Lee. He himself gave all the glory to his younger brother
whose tragic death, however, forced him to come out as the head of the
firm.

Lee Shubert is a strong and absolutely fearless man, not a lover of the
theater as David Belasco is but a business man who plays with theaters
and plays, with authors and actors as pawns in a game of high finance.
His influence in the theater has been very great and no one who knows
the story of his fight against Klaw and Erlanger and their powerful
associates can fairly withhold real admiration for his courage and
energy.

During the week my play was at the Bastable Theatre in Syracuse, Lee
Shubert persuaded me to sign a contract taking over the Baker Theatre,
Rochester, for a season of summer stock. I eagerly fell for his idea as
I was hungry for the experience and knew that it would be of great
benefit to me. I have always been curious to see the inside workings of
every branch of the theatrical business and in the years since then I
doubt if there is any ramification of the game in which I have not had a
finger, sometimes a burned finger, but always an eager one.

I signed this contract and engaged a company in New York before I
started on a western tour with LOST IN THE DESERT. Unfortunately,
however, before the date of the Rochester opening came round, my share
of the losses on LOST IN THE DESERT had so eaten up my profits on
THROUGH THE BREAKERS that I arrived in Rochester with no assets beyond a
perfectly good wife and fifty-four dollars in cash to meet fifteen
trusting actors who were to depend upon me for their living for the next
twenty weeks.

Details are apt to escape one’s mind after twenty-five years, but I have
some hazy recollection of having been rather up against it there in
Rochester. My books, however, prove that I opened the season with THE
FATAL CALL—loss five hundred and two dollars—and followed with THE TWO
ORPHANS—loss three hundred and six dollars. I can’t help wishing those
books of mine told me how I did it.

One memory, however, is very clear. The play for the third week arrived
from the play brokers, C.O.D., two hundred dollars, and lay in the
express office as safe from me as it is ever possible for any play to
be. I was quite at the end of my string and had no possible avenue of
escape. That day, after the matinée of THE TWO ORPHANS, I said a polite
good day to the deputy sheriff who seemed to have taken a great fancy to
my private chair in the theater’s box office and started walking the
streets trying to think of some possible means of keeping my company
together. In my walk I passed a second hand book store and my eye caught
the title of a ragged old volume in the tray marked “ten cents”—UNDER
TWO FLAGS. This cross marks the spot where I started a trick of high
pressure play writing, a trick which of course I put sternly behind me
long years ago, although I have never been able to convince many people
of my reformation. In any case Owen Davis’ Baker Theatre Stock Company
opened five days later in a dramatization of UNDER TWO FLAGS and played
for four weeks—profit $10,250 (by the book).

For four years I ran this company in Rochester every summer and during
that time, in partnership with the Shuberts, took over houses in
Syracuse, Utica, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. They were busy years. In
Rochester I was company manager, stage director, press agent, head
box-office boy and whenever business got bad I’d write the next week’s
play to save paying for one.

During all this time Mrs. Davis was a member of the company and adored
by the Rochester audiences. She might have had a brilliant career in the
theater if she had chosen to stick to it instead of devoting her life to
“her men” as she has always called us, “her men” being myself and our
sons, Donald and Owen, Jr. For a long time I am afraid she found it very
hard to give up the work she loved but I am sure she is well rewarded
for her sacrifice now in the excitement and joy of seeing these two boys
climbing so sturdily ahead on the path she knows so well—an unusual
experience for a mother—not only to have hope and faith in her sons but
to know exactly what each step they take means and where they are going.

During the following five years we divided our time between these stock
companies in the summer and New York in the winter. In those five years
I wrote thirty-eight melodramas, two farces, a number of vaudeville acts
and burlesque pieces and one big show for the Hippodrome, as well as
picking up any other little job that came to hand.

It was during this time I wrote my first play for Sam Harris, then a
member of the firm of Sullivan, Harris and Woods, and started a
friendship that has lasted ever since. A little later Al Woods sent for
me and told me he was leaving the firm and was about to set up for
himself. Our interview ended in the drawing of the most remarkable
contract ever made between a manager and an author. By its terms Woods
was to produce not less than four new plays, and after the first year,
four old ones each season for five years. During that time I could not
write for any other manager and he could not produce a play written by
any other author. During the five years Mr. Woods produced fifty odd
plays of mine but we both of us cheated shamefully on the other part of
our agreement. We produced a number of plays by the late Theodore Kramer
and I sneaked a few over with other popular-priced managers of the day.

Woods was, and is, a remarkable man, a great showman and a man of
humorous and philosophic nature. His outstanding characteristic is, to
me, that if he loves a play he knows how to produce it. If he tries to
do a play he doesn’t love he knows nothing about it and cares less. He
has but two opinions of a play when he reads it, “Swell” or “It don’t
appeal to me,” and when he plays his hunch he’s very apt to succeed.
This instinctive feel for values is one of the greatest assets in the
equipment of the theatrical manager and Al Woods and William A. Brady
have more of it than any other men of my time. It is a pure instinct,
quite apart from any critical faculty and is emotional rather than the
result of any reasoning.

David Belasco, a great showman, always seemed to me to see in a play
manuscript the thing it would develop into under his guidance, but Woods
and Brady sense an audience’s response to certain sorts of melodramatic
situations and when they play their instinct and not their judgment they
usually are right.

The first play under my contract with Woods was THE CONFESSIONS OF A
WIFE, which really wasn’t nearly so dreadful as it sounds. The second
was THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST, probably the best popular-priced melodrama
produced during these years. Then came CONVICT 999, CHINATOWN CHARLIE
and the famous NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL.

During my time with Al Woods, one of our most unusual experiences was
with a melodrama called THE MARKED WOMAN and only a day or two ago, when
I dropped into Mr. Woods’ office for a friendly chat, Martin Herman, Mr.
Woods’ brother and general manager, gravely brought us in a contract,
yellow with age, to remind us of an absurd but to us at the time a
perfectly normal activity. In those days everything was fish that came
to our net. If a particularly horrible murder excited the public, we had
it dramatized and on the stage usually before any one knew who had been
guilty of the crime. Frequently I have had a job of hasty re-writing
when it became evident that my chosen culprit from real life was an
innocent and perfectly respectable citizen.

I went into the Woods office one day about twenty-five years ago and
noticed a well-dressed and well-mannered young Chinaman patiently seated
in a chair in the waiting room. I asked Martin Herman what he wanted and
Martin replied that he was crazy and that Al couldn’t be bothered with
him. Later in the day, however, Oriental patience conquered and as a
result I was called into conference with Mr. Woods and this
well-mannered Chinaman.

With some difficulty Woods and I were made to understand that our friend
from the Orient was the custodian of a very large sum of real money
which he wanted to devote to the cause of the Liberal Party in China.
These were the days of the old Empress and the Republican Party was just
beginning to be heard from. Part of their activity was to arouse in
America an antagonism toward the late Empress Dowager and I was asked to
write and Mr. Woods to produce a play in which the poor old lady would
be shown up as a sort of composite picture of all the evil characters of
history. Woods and I had never met any Empresses at the time—although at
this writing I understand Mr. Woods is in the habit of hobnobbing with
all the crowned heads of Europe—but as there was no doubt at all of the
money being both real and plentiful we swallowed our scruples, if we had
any, and what I did to the old Empress of China I shudder to recall.

When I finished the play and took it to Woods, he said it was a whale,
although I myself had some doubts of its merit. Our Chinese angel, by
now reënforced by a committee of his fellow countrymen, said it was
without doubt a mighty drama and their only suggestion was that they
would like to see a scene put in where the Empress poisoned a child. I
sternly refused to surrender the integrity of my script, although I made
some small concessions in the nature of arson and murder and THE MARKED
WOMAN was ready for production.

The popular-priced circuit never had seen such a lavish display—please
remember that all bills were paid by the Republican Party of
China—costumes had been sent us from Pekin, the duty alone on which was
many times more than any play had ever cost us. To this day my wife has
several gorgeous Chinese robes, her only graft in all these years.

THE MARKED WOMAN, to my surprise, was a great success from the first,
although Edward E. Rose, who staged it, and I were not quite satisfied
with the last act and determined to improve it. About three weeks after
the opening, Mr. Rose and I jumped out to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where
the company was playing, and watched a matinée performance. As soon as
the final curtain fell we rushed back stage and called the company for
rehearsal. I seated myself at a table with a pad of paper and threw the
sheets at Ed Rose as I filled them while he forced the lines into the
poor actors’ heads and re-grouped and re-staged the scenes. The result
was that we played that night, only three hours later, the last act for
our second act and the second act for our last. This was, I am
confident, about as complete a job of revision as was ever accomplished
between a matinée and a night.

All went well with THE MARKED WOMAN for some time but one day our
Chinese backers called on Mr. Woods and told him that the play must
close at once. Mr. Woods, who had a hit on his hands, smiled pleasantly
and asked the reason and was told that the most powerful of the Chinese
Tongs had threatened to kill our friends if the play was performed after
one more week. Mr. Woods expressed great sympathy but said he was sorry
but his duty to me, the author, prevented him from doing as they
requested. The next day the gentlemen returned to say that the Tong had
informed them that they had slightly altered their plan and now proposed
if the play continued to kill Mr. Woods. Al said that it was a lousy
play anyway and he had never liked it, but a statement from Pittsburgh
showing a big profit calmed him sufficiently to enable him to defy the
Tongs to do their worst.

The next day letters with death heads began to arrive and as these
failed to ruffle his majestic calm a voice, speaking broken English,
called him on the telephone and informed him that if the play was
performed even once after the following Saturday night his body would be
found in the East River the following Monday. As Mr. Woods’ body is
still to be found comfortably seated in his office at the Eltinge
Theatre, it is not difficult to deduct his reaction to that voice—we
closed.

For eight years the Stair and Havlin Circuit, as the string of
popular-priced theaters that extended across the United States was
called, were amazingly prosperous and in their rise, their prosperity
and their decline, I should like to trace an analogy between them and
the motion picture industry of the present day—in the nature of a
warning and a prophecy.

During the eight years of which I am writing the average business of
these theaters was definitely fixed at about three thousand five hundred
dollars a week. The fluctuations of business were nominal, the people
wanted our shows, just as to-day there is a fixed demand for talking
pictures, not for a good picture, although already one may see evidences
of discrimination on the part of the public which, I fear, the picture
companies are no more prepared to gratify than we of the old
popular-priced theater were in our day. All we had to do was to see that
our weekly running expense came to five hundred dollars less than our
share of the take—then multiply this by forty, as the houses were open
forty weeks a year, and we had a profit of twenty thousand a year from
each show.

During each of these years we had from seven to thirteen plays of my
writing on this circuit.


[Illustration:

  ELIZABETH DREYER
  “And a few months later and with much more difficulty persuaded her to
    become a member of the Davis family.”
]


[Illustration:

  LAURETTE TAYLOR
  “One of the best soubrettes I ever saw.”
  (_Photograph by Ira L. Hill. From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


Then one day—and let me call the attention of the rulers of the motion
picture business to this—Mr. Woods and I were struck by a great notion.
“We will,” we said, “increase this average business of $3,500 by putting
out a show so much bigger than any of the others that we can safely
count on over-capacity business to pay our increased expense and yield
us a greater than average profit.”

No sooner said than done. NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL took to the
road and played for a year to an average of four thousand dollars a
week. What could be more natural than to continue the good work? The
next season we put out three more “big shows” and allowed them to cost
us about thirty percent more than our old average of expense. By this
time our rivals, attracted by the reports of our big business with our
“Super-Specials” began to compete for this added revenue and produced a
flock of “Super-Specials” which in a season, since all things are
comparative, educated the public to expect “big shows.” Thus, the
average show now costs a sum of money that could only be drawn by an
extraordinary show, and in three years the popular-priced theater
business was dead.

Naturally, the advance of the pictures had something to do with our
defeat, but neither then nor now can the decline of the theater be
fairly laid to the fact that the public prefers the motion picture to
the drama. All of the ills of the theater in my time are due directly to
the folly, the ignorance and the greed of the theatrical manager. I have
many life-long friends among these men; among them are men of fine
principle and honest intentions, but the composite manager has always
been the stumbling block in the way of our progress. We tried to fight
the advancing wave of motion pictures with dirty, ill-lighted theaters,
bad-mannered attendants and arrogant box-office men, and we lost, as we
deserved to lose.

There is a popular idea that the theatrical manager failed at his job
because he allowed his artistic soul to overwhelm his natural business
instincts. In my humble opinion he failed because he usually had no
artistic soul at all and no business instincts. I know of about five
managers of the last decade who were what I would call business men, and
I am prepared to offer a silver cup for the names of any others.

The arrogance of the old-time manager, to whom actors and authors were
slaves and chattels, has gone, and although I was one of those who
fought for their passing I have not as yet become reconciled to their
substitutes. The best men of to-day are still the men who were the best
of the old order and if some of their old power is gone I can’t help
feeling that with it went much of the old glamour and romance of the
theater.

This writing rubber stamp stories by formula was the main cause of the
collapse of the Stair and Havlyn Circuit and is the only real reason for
to-day’s depression in the New York theater. There is always an audience
for a good play, but unfortunately there isn’t always a good play for an
audience. Just as every good play produced stimulates theatergoing, so
does every bad play produced discourage it, and when the bad plays
outnumber the good by too great a proportion the public naturally
becomes very cautious. We figure of late in the theater that only one
play out of seven produced is even moderately successful, which when you
come to think of it isn’t so much the public’s lack of interest as it is
the playwright’s lack of skill.

When a man has spent time and money to see six terrible plays one after
the other it isn’t surprising that his eagerness is somewhat cooled. If
it were possible to bring into New York this season fifteen fine plays
we should hear no more talk about hard times in the theater.
Unfortunately it isn’t possible.

Under the present conditions the demand for good plays has little effect
upon the supply partly because good plays are hard to write and even
more because we are not in agreement as to what constitutes a good play.

The novelist often succeeds upon his literary style, a painter by his
drawing and his sense of color, but paradoxically enough a good play is
a bad play unless the writer has been fortunate in the choice of his
subject matter; skill alone won’t save him. Since the only real standard
by which one may judge a play is the rather primitive one of whether one
likes it or not, it is easy to see how dangerous a game this play
writing is. A good workman may work his heart out for many months to be
condemned at last by the same feeling that gave birth to the old
doggerel “I do not like you, Doctor Fell.”

Few critics are clever enough to make the distinction between a writer’s
skill and his good or evil fortune in the choice of his subject, and I
am often amused to read the praises of the genius of an author who has
been lucky enough to hit upon a theme or story that has tickled the
public’s fancy and the complete damnation of the poor wretch who has
failed to do so, although in every other particular the later play may
be ten times as well built and well written as the former. Naturally we
like to be amused and resent being bored. Yet, as a matter of truth, the
same skill, the same hard work and the same knowledge of life and of
play structure goes into a man’s failures as he puts into his successes.
The writer who knows his trade fails or triumphs the hour he makes his
decision of what he is going to write about. Then, too, the subject
matter of plays is still far too often dictated by the manager and
between us we are still getting ourselves into trouble trying to guess
what the public wants instead of trying to do the best work we know how
to do and letting it go at that. The old notion that the experienced
showman knows more about plays than our present public knows dies hard
and many of our plays are still being written by and for an intelligence
distinctly below the average intelligence of the audience.

The day of the routine comedy-drama and melodrama is over. The
successful play of to-day is nine times out of ten a good play. In fact
the most encouraging thing about the theater to-day is not that good
plays are sure of success but that bad plays are sure of failure. An
optimist may look happily forward to the time when writers and managers
who remain blind to the change in public taste and persist in producing
routine sugar-coated piffle will all have starved to death or been
driven out of the business.

This change has come about very gradually, as immigration has been
restricted and the living standards of the American people have
advanced. Life to-day is stimulating where once it was, at least for the
majority, dull and uneventful. Romance, once supplied almost wholly by
the theater, is all about us. Modern thought, modern invention, have
done much to end the bland acceptance of routine fiction, both on the
stage and on the printed page, and to be sure of an audience to-day one
must have something to say and know how to say it.

Of course, I am writing now of twenty years ago but even then the change
was coming and in a way I was alive to it. I am, at this point, quite
willing to admit that I frequently turn out work far beneath the
standard that my observation tells me is necessary for success, and that
to-morrow I am quite as apt to start frantically at work on an untrue
and obsolete theme as any novice. There are writers who are under the
control of their own critical faculty, but unfortunately for me I have
never been one of them. A story pops into my head. Often I know it has
no importance at all and sternly shut it out. But, as is often the case,
if the story keeps coming back of its own free will I usually end by
forgiving it its obvious faults and gradually working myself up into a
lather of paternal pride.... Who ever saw a young mother whose baby
didn’t seem remarkable to her? These yarns of mine seem good to me
because they are mine. If any one else was to ask my opinion of the same
story I would say it was terrible, but by the time I have lived with it
for a month or so I see beauty in it, because I am looking at it hoping
to see that beauty.

As a matter of fact, one of the greatest differences between a good play
and a bad one is that a good play says what the writer thinks it says,
while a bad one doesn’t. Play writing is really an extraordinary
difficult art; if all that was necessary for an emotion to reach an
audience was for the writer to feel that emotion, we would have few
failures. It is quite possible for a writer to be honestly affected by
the sorrows of a character without the audience in the least sharing his
feeling. I have often wept as I wrote a scene that never in the least
affected any one besides myself. I have chuckled over many a farce
situation that never got a laugh. A playwright’s words and his
situations must have that strange power that will project them over the
footlights. This projecting force is made up of instinct, experience,
sincerity and a queer sense of rhythm, the timing of the dramatist.

When I am asked how much play writing may be taught I always hesitate. A
lot may be taught—to the right person—very little to the one without the
instinctive ear—the sense of pace and build that must be there, although
just exactly what it is and where it comes from I find it difficult to
explain.

I dug up recently, out of my files, one of the first plays I ever wrote,
and was amazed at its crudity, but even more amazed by the lilt of it;
its pace, its timing and its gradual accumulation to its crescendo were
as deft and as sure as anything I could write to-day ... and at the time
I wrote it these things were entirely instinctive. One may learn a lot
about what not to write, may learn much of literary style and taste and
many of the tricks of construction, but I doubt if any one without the
instinctive feel of the born dramatist can learn how to time a speech or
pitch a climax and without this all the rest is useless.

Many of the greatest novelists, both of the past and the present, have
failed utterly when they tried to write for the theater. Often they were
far better writers than any dramatist I know. They knew as much about
moods and character as any of us—but their words won’t play, no one can
act their scenes.

Few persons realize how vital this instinctive timing is to a play.
Bartley Campbell, a dramatist of the old school, was a master of it. His
old drama, THE WHITE SLAVE, was quite as lyric as any song. The late
Charles Kline could time a climax so deftly that, although “the big
scene” of THE LION AND THE MOUSE hardly makes sense when you read the
words, it was impossible not to be thrilled by them when you heard them
spoken.

The writer of the old school was more dependent upon this instinctive
timing than the writer of to-day, but even now the man or woman who
writes for the theater must write “good theater” no matter how sound may
be his philosophy. Instinct and emotion will, I think, always be more
vital to success than literary style or even good sense and logic.

To-day a writer must avoid the conventions just as yesterday he had to
abide by them, and in this difference lies the distinction between the
old school and the new. In the days of which I am writing, the
characters of our popular-priced plays were as sturdily founded upon a
conventional mold as the most dogmatic creed of the most narrow-minded
religious fanatics of the day, and any stepping aside upon a more
flowery path was sternly frowned upon. The good play maker of the
popular-priced theater was supposed to know what a proper list of
characters for a play must be and any departure from that accepted list
was taken as a sign of the bad workman.

In my day the list ran as follows:


1. HERO.

The hero was either poor or else very young and very drunk. If sober and
wealthy he automatically became a villain. Wild young men with wealthy
fathers might do in a pinch—they could be reformed by the heroine in the
third act, and in this lady’s company, in the last act, they could
receive the father’s blessing and the keys to the cellar, or whatever
best represented the family fortune. I was, however, never very strong
for the rich young man type of hero, well knowing how much closer to the
hearts of the audience the honest working man type was sure to be. Brave
this hero must always be, and strong and kind, but it was unfortunately
difficult for him to be wise, as the burden of troubles it was necessary
to load upon this poor man’s shoulders, by way of dramatic suspense,
would never have been carried by any one but a terrible sap.


2. HEROINE.

If the hero was extremely poor, it was possible for her to be extremely
wealthy, but by far the safest bet was to make her the daughter of an
honest working man. In these days the young girls who went to the
popular-priced theaters were not themselves employed to any extent as
clerks or stenographers, and they knew more about factory life and the
experience of the day laborer and less about the white collar workers
than they know to-day. Our heroine must be pure at any cost, or else she
must die. There could be no temporizing with the “the wages of sin are
death” slogan. In all my experience I never once saw it successfully
defied. The heroine must, of course, always marry the hero. Our
audiences would not stand for any but a happy ending with love and
wealth bestowed upon the girl. This was bad art, but it always seemed to
me to be pretty good sense, as the theater to them meant not life as it
was but life as they wanted it to be, and the young girl in our
audiences who thrilled for an hour over the wealth and luxury and the
ideal love that always came to the fictitious character she had for a
time exchanged places with had little chance of remaining in this
fairyland for long.


3. THE HEAVY MAN.

Always wealthy; the silk hat was his badge of office. In a good
melodrama he never reformed, he bit the dust. He was the most absurd
thing connected with these old plays. The necessity for his evil
plotting was so great that even the most innocent of audiences must have
frequently wondered why he was not poisoned at an early age by his own
unfortunate disposition. As a matter of fact, one of the principal
causes of the death of this form of entertainment was the “Desperate
Desmond” cartoons that instructed our public in the absurdity of this
stock character.


4. THE HEAVY WOMAN.

There were two of her, the haughty lady of wealth and social position,
quite naturally the instinctive enemy of our audiences, and the “bad
woman” who in these days was spoken of in a hushed whisper. I recall
some successful heavy women who had dark hair, but these were always
cast in the society women parts. The real bad ones had to be blondes and
they averaged a good hundred and sixty pounds.


5. THE SOUBRETTE.

A working girl with bad manners and a good heart. Laurette Taylor was
one of the best of these I ever saw. This type of part, the real
soubrette, has disappeared from our theater, and yet some of the best
actresses I have ever known were soubrettes,—Maggie Mitchell, Minnie
Palmer, Mrs. Fiske (when she was Minnie Maddern) and a host of others.


6. THE COMEDIAN.

Either Jew, Irish or German, the most important member of the company in
the old days and the one who drew the largest salary. We might and, as a
matter of fact, we frequently did get away with a terrible leading man,
but the comedian had to be good.


7. THE LIGHT COMEDY BOY.

This character was always a humble and faithful friend of the lovers and
was always in love with the soubrette. I recall once trying to have this
character in love with some one else—but I had to rewrite the play. The
audience got too bewildered.


8. THE SECOND HEAVY.

He was just a bum, a tool of the villain’s, and as it was usual to kill
him along toward the middle of the second act, we never found it
necessary to engage a very good actor.

                  *       *       *       *       *

These eight made up the cast and to them we added two or three utility
actors to play such “walking parts” as the plot demanded, but no matter
what the play these eight characters were always in it. If they hadn’t
been I am sure the audience would have demanded their money back.

Scenically, these plays of ours were very elaborate. They were always in
four acts and frequently with as many as five scenes in each act.
CHINATOWN CHARLIE had twenty-two scenes. The mechanical dexterity
demanded in writing a play of this kind was very important and an
extremely difficult trick to acquire. Front scenes in the old melodramas
were always flat and stupid, just as they are in the musical comedies of
to-day. The expert workman let his front scenes run the exact time it
took the stage carpenters to set the next scene back of it and not a
moment longer, which took experience and care. It was also necessary to
climax these scenes and these scene climaxes were the forerunners of the
modern “blackout”—some sure-fire “belly-laugh” or bit of heroic bunk
that would be sure to bring a yell of delight from the audience to cover
the moment in the dark necessary to fly the drop and start the next
scene.

After a time I got to be so expert in this that I could give a cue to
the audience for a laugh or a yell of approval that would last just long
enough to fill in the desired pause. To me the most interesting thing
about these old manuscripts of mine are these “audience cues” that would
be meaningless to any one who should chance to read them but were a very
real and very necessary part of the play.

Just how I could have been quite serious in building these old plays I
can’t at this moment quite comprehend, but the fact is that I was, just
as every man who is successful in his work must be. Even the priceless
line of Nellie, the well-known cloak model, was quite gravely written.
Nellie was endeavoring to escape from the attentions of a very evil
gentleman who from the start of the play showed signs of paying her
attentions that were far from honorable. In the first act he pushed her
under a descending elevator in the basement of a department store. In
Act II he threw her off Brooklyn Bridge and in the third he bound her to
the tracks of the elevated railroad just as a train came thundering
along. In the fourth act he climbs in her bedroom window at an early
hour of the morning and when both modesty and prudence force her to
shrink away from him he looked at her reproachfully and said: “Why do
you fear me, Nellie?”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            ────────────────
                     CHAPTER V ◆ UP FROM MELODRAMA
                            ────────────────


About 1911 I saw the fate of the popular-priced game, and got out of it
before the final crash, as did Sam Harris, Al Woods and a few of the
others. I started to look about for a new way of earning my living. I
had made money at the game and was in no danger from that source, but I
was then, in 1910, only thirty-seven years old and had trained myself to
the habit of almost constant work, a habit I have never as yet been able
to break.

My name, as the author of literally hundreds of bloodthirsty melodramas,
was a thing of scorn to the highbrows of the theater, used as a horrible
example to young authors and to frighten bad children. The very thought
of my being allowed to produce a play in a Broadway theater was quite
absurd, as my friends all assured me. I kept on writing, however, for
the same reason that keeps me at it now, because I love to write plays,
no matter whom it hurts. For a year or two I had a tough time, but I
managed to find a market among the road stars and the one night stand
companies, and I wrote a few comedies and dramatized several novels.
They were successful enough in the towns where they were played but were
never heard of in New York. At this time, also, I developed a trick of
writing plays directly for stock companies and by good salesmanship
built up quite an income from this by-product. I was absolutely bound to
break into the New York game and in spite of many rebuffs I kept
knocking at the doors of the New York managers.

The doors of New York managers, however, were closely guarded, even in
the comparatively far-off days of which I am writing, and in the season
of 1910 the best I could manage to do, aside from my usual flock of road
shows and my growing list of plays popular with the stock companies at
that time successfully scattered all over the country, was to secure a
couple of matinée performances. As a matter of fact, a matinée
performance of the play of a new author is simply a public announcement
by the manager of his lack of faith and neither of these efforts of mine
came to much. The first of these, THE WISHING RING, was produced by Lee
Shubert at Daly’s with Marguerite Clark and a supporting company thrown
together from the cast of a musical play at that time current in the
theater. Marguerite Clark was charming in the part and later made use of
the play on the road and produced it for a short run in Chicago. THE
WISHING RING was directed by Cecil De Mille and was, I think, the last
thing he did before he left New York and threw in his lot with the
picture people.

The second of these half-hearted matinée productions was made for me by
Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum and gave Laurette Taylor one of her first
chances to show her very extraordinary talent. This play, LOLA, was a
queer sort of fish, part crude melodrama and part a very real and very
fine example of good play writing, but it was one of those plays of
which one must say it is either great or absurd. My shady reputation and
the hasty and careless production made only one answer probable. In
fact, it was many years before the name of Owen Davis was much of a help
to a play, and it would probably have taken me at least a thousand to
establish a trade-mark as a serious dramatist had the public known that
aside from the crimes committed under the name of Owen Davis I must also
answer to many others. I had fallen into the playful habit of inventing
other names to hide my evil deeds. At one time I used so many assumed
names that the mere invention of them became a task and Al Woods used to
help me out by calmly borrowing the name of one of his clerks or
stenographers and writing it down as author of my latest thriller.

When CONVICT 999 was first produced in Pittsburgh, the dramatic critic
of the largest of the morning papers said in his review of the play:
“Here at last is a fine melodrama and heaven be praised. Here, in the
person of John Oliver, a new writer, we have at last found a man who
knows more about how to write a play of this kind than the irrepressible
Owen Davis ever knew.”

William A. Brady was the first to give me a regular Broadway production
with a first class company and in doing so, although he little knew it
at the time, he started an association that lasted for many years. Mr.
Brady is a strong man and had he been able to foresee what was in store
for him the day on which we signed our first contract, it is highly
probable these confessions would never have been written. With great
confidence, however, Mr. Brady commanded me to write him a big melodrama
and as a result Doris Keane and William Courtney appeared in a direful
thing called MAKING GOOD. The title of this play turned out to be a
god-send to the New York critics and if I had put as much wit into my
play as they put into their slaughter of it, Mr. Brady and I would have
been happier even if they had been deprived of a great pleasure. As a
matter of fact, I should be a very popular man with the critics. Several
of them owe their standing as humorists almost entirely to me and at
least one of the finest of them, Frank O’Malley, won his place in the
ranks of humorists over my dead body.

In later years Mr. O’Malley confided to me that he often journeyed miles
to get to a play of mine, a compliment that at the time I quite failed
to value at its true worth.

Twenty-four hours after the first New York production of MAKING GOOD I
was safely hidden in the country with my still loyal wife and two small
sons, luckily at the time too young to know their shame. At once I
started out, quite undismayed, to write another. One old habit that
still clings to me: if I have a failure, to sit down at my desk before I
have so much as slept on it, and write at least part of the next one; as
a matter of fact, most of the good plays I have written have been
started at such a time. Here then, in the wilds of Westchester, I stuck
to it until I finished THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, much the best thing I had
done up to then, and a play that might very well be a success if
produced to-day. The manuscript of this play I sent at once to a
play-broker with instructions to offer it for production with no
author’s name on the manuscript. A few days later the broker called me
up with the startling information that he had sold my play to William A.
Brady—rather dread news as, following what the New York critics had said
about MAKING GOOD, Mr. Brady had thrown me out of his office and
practically forbidden me its sacred ground.

It seemed, so my broker said, that Mr. Brady had paid good money for an
option on the play and was very curious as to the identity of the modest
author. When he learned it, he had something very like a stroke, but in
time he forgave me.

All the years I worked with Mr. Brady were punctuated by terrible fights
between us that always ended in a renewal of friendship and affection.
He is by far the most colorful figure in the American theater and even
when one disagrees with him, which is apt to be rather often, his
strength and his complete belief in his own opinion cause his opponents
awful moments of doubt. If Mr. Brady really set out to convince me that
a red apple was a yellow one, I should at once go and order a new pair
of glasses.

Mr. Brady, David Belasco and Daniel Frohman are the last of the old
guard and, each in his different way, has written his name boldly on the
pages of our drama. Different as these three men are they have one thing
in common: a great and abiding love of the theater and its people.

Mr. Brady and I together did THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, SINNERS, FOREVER
AFTER, AT 9.45 and many others. FOREVER AFTER was Alice Brady’s first
big part; partly owing to its simple, straightforward love story and
partly to her fine performance, it turned out to be one of the best
money-makers I have ever had. These plays were at the moment my idea of
one step up from the NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL of the Al Woods
days.

At about this time the Actors’ Equity Association was formed and pulled
a real battle for their rights against the absurd and vicious standards
of the business. That they won that battle is well-known and that they
deserved to win it is fully admitted by fair-minded and honest managers
of the Sam Harris type—although, of course, if all managers had been of
his type no fight would have been necessary.

The actors’ strike at this time closed all the theaters and, as usual,
the author, who wasn’t in the fight at all and had nothing to win
whatever the outcome, lost much more money than any actor and rather
resented the row being pulled in his front yard. Most authors were in
sympathy with the actors but I know that for one I wished they had
chosen to fight with some other weapons than my three plays, the runs of
which were interrupted and from which I had been drawing a very
considerable royalty.

Hit in the dramatist’s tenderest spot, we met and organized and from
that day to this many of my hours have been given up to service to the
authors’ societies. I was at that time the last president of the old
Society of American Dramatists and Composers and a member of the
Authors’ League. With the help of a handful of ardent spirits, I brought
all the active dramatists of the day into the old society and merged it
with the Authors’ League as the Dramatists’ Guild of the Authors’ League
of America. A group of strong men and women came to the front and served
faithfully on hundreds of committees and through long hours of
conferences. Among the most active of these were Augustus Thomas, James
Forbes, Gene Buck, Rupert Hughes, Channing Pollock, Edward Childs
Carpenter, Percival Wilde, Rachel Crothers, Ann Crawford Flexner, Jules
Goodman and Montague Glass; then later Arthur Richman, George Middleton
and William Cary Duncan and a number of others.

I remained as president of this group until I resigned to take up the
presidency of the Authors’ League and gave, as all these others gave, a
very considerable part of my life for many years. At present, thanks to
our efforts, the dramatists are as well organized as the actors and like
the actor eager at all times for a battle, but we are unfortunately
quite without an adversary, one of the peculiar things about the manager
being that he is unable to agree to anything whatever that any other
manager thinks would be a good thing.

At meetings of the managerial society one man will frequently say: “I
don’t know what Mr. Blank wants to do about this problem, but anything
he thinks I think different.” It is a truly tragic thing that the men
who should be the leaders of the great institution that the American
theater should be have been incapable of enough business foresight to
bind themselves firmly together to protect their interests. Always we
have been out-generaled by the motion picture men, bled white by the
ticket speculator and discriminated against by the railroads, the labor
unions, and even the newspapers, who are by rights our natural allies
and our traditional friends. If the theater is the cultural and the
educational force I have always claimed it was, surely it has a right to
public loyalty and support and I must always think that, if we have in
large part lost that support, it is because the dignity and the
importance of the drama has been hidden by the lack of dignity and the
lack of importance of many of our leaders.

I thought these things in the time of which I am now writing, 1912-1913,
but naturally I had neither the independence of age nor circumstance at
that time to dare to fully express myself. Just before the war I had
begun to be impatient of the machine-made plays I had been writing for
so long and began to listen to my wife’s pleadings to cut down the
quantity and try to improve the quality of my work. She had been begging
me to do this for ten years or more, and like other good husbands I
rather like to do any little thing my wife asks of me—after she has been
asking it for ten years. I really think I wanted to please her, but I
also think that I had by this time outgrown the sentimental comedy-drama
as once before I had outgrown the cheap melodramas. Naturally enough as
soon as I lost my own belief in my form of expression I was no longer
successful in it.

Let no man go unchallenged who in your presence talks of purposely
“writing down” to an audience, or of “giving them what they want” or any
other fish-bait of that description. I am here to tell you that no man
ever successfully wrote or produced any play, or any novel below his own
mental level at the moment. When I wrote NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK
MODEL, I was honestly deeply moved by the lady’s many misfortunes or I
couldn’t have put it over, and when I wrote the comedy-dramas that
followed it I truly believed in them or no audience in the world would
have sat through them. This is always true, I think, of writers or of
managers. We are entirely emotional people and our work reflects us. I
know of several supremely successful producers who made great fortunes
selling the piffle they loved and who, as soon as their money brought
them contacts that resulted in an increase in their taste and knowledge
promptly appointed themselves judges of the drama and even more promptly
went broke.

You may well afford to laugh at the faker who boasts of skill great
enough to assume a mood and color different from his own. The next time
he tells you of how he “wrote down to the boobs” simply tell him he is
either a liar or a fool—probably both. For surely, if he is not a liar,
he must be the greatest fool on earth to use for a cheap success a
genius great enough to have brought him a real one.


[Illustration:

  _Faithfully yours,
  J. Jefferson_
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


[Illustration:

  “I have always admired Augustus Thomas”
  (_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)
]


If then, about fifteen years ago, I wanted to write a higher form of
drama it was for no nobler reason than because I had begun to be bored
by the sort of work I was doing and because it bored me it had begun to
bore my audiences. Several times in my life I have been driven to an
advance of this sort and always because of the fact that I found my old
occupation gone. As time goes on, I have come to believe that if I could
live two or three hundred years I might develop into quite a playwright.
In any case I once more threw my box of tricks away and sat down quietly
and tried to study out a new method. In this I was helped by the change
that had begun to come over the drama. I was influenced as all our
writers were at the time by the Russian and Hungarian dramatists who had
discarded the artificial form of the “well-made play” and were writing a
new form of photographic realism that tempted us all to follow in their
footsteps.

As a result I wrote THE DETOUR, which remains in my mind the example of
the best work I have done for the theater. Of all my plays the DETOUR,
THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST (one of the old melodramas of the Al Woods days)
and THE NERVOUS WRECK are my pets. THE DETOUR was produced by Lee
Shubert at the Astor Theatre in the early fall of 1921 and, although it
was never a money-maker, it gave me what I wanted and made my wife very
happy. As she had stuck around by this time for some fifteen years
waiting for something like this to happen, it was, to say the least, no
more than she deserved.

In the production of THE DETOUR I was fortunate enough to be able to
secure Augustin Duncan to play the principal part and to stage the play.
He more than justified the confidence I had in him. To me Mr. Duncan is
a great artist and by far the most sincere example of the man who puts
his art above his pocketbook I have ever met. I suppose more rot has
been spilled out by men and women who pose as “devoted to their art”
than by any other set of posing hypocrites since the world began. We all
of us play the tune we know and to rebuke us for that tune is as silly
as it is to praise us for it. To use what talents we may have to earn a
decent living for ourselves and those dependent upon us is, to a man of
any philosophy, a far finer thing than to sit in a Greenwich Village
attic and mouth jealous platitudes about the baseness of commercial art.

This statement of my opinion is neither a defense nor an alibi. I
myself, as these confessions of mine are describing to you, have always
written for the love of the theater rather than from any art impulse and
I am the first to admit that my love of the theater has always been more
compelling than my love of the drama, if you follow me in the
distinction.

As a practical man, born of a practical line of hard-headed Yanks, I
have studied my own small talents and developed them and tried to make
up for a lack of the real fires of genius by an honest admission of that
lack and a true enthusiasm for the work that at the moment came nearest
to expressing my attitude. The true genius, the true artist, is very
rare, but Augustin Duncan is distinctly of that number. He is quite as
incapable of doing any work that doesn’t seem fine to him as I am of
writing anything at all unless I am going to be paid for it, and he is
as firm in his refusals as I am. And in my life, during which I have
written several million words, I doubt if I have written five thousand
without practical reward.

Max Gordon, one of the managers with whom I have been associated, looked
at me in troubled amazement one day lately when I had made some mildly
humorous comment and said: “That’s the first time I ever heard you say
anything funny for less than ten percent.” Max Gordon, like many others
of my acquaintance, assumes this attitude of mine to be founded on a
desire for money, but as a matter of fact I care very little about money
or the things that money stands for. Any man who can make good can
always make money, but the fun is in the making good, in the thrill and
the sense of power that comes from activities sanely thought out and
successfully accomplished. Under Mr. Duncan’s fine direction THE DETOUR
was molded into shape and ready for its first performance. Not one word
of my original manuscript was changed from the day I wrote it, which
fact is most amazingly to his credit rather than to mine. He is so fine
a director that he molded his company to my play, rather than my play to
his company—the true duty of a director, although few of them have the
sense to know it. To the picture director an author’s play is a sort of
clover field in which he loves to kick up his heels and romp about at
his own sweet will, making any changes at all that his fancy may
dictate, most of them being made for the very simple reason that he
doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of what is on the written page in front
of him. Even in the theater there are few managers who realize the value
of one man’s unbroken line of thought. “Plays are not written, they are
re-written” is a motto often repeated to writers and in the old days
these wise words were proudly framed and hung over the desk of one of
our greatest producers. This musty old truism has been used to slaughter
plays during all the years since Dion Boucicault first uttered it, and
like most other truisms its principal fault lies in the fact that it
isn’t true. When I was in Harvard I met Mr. Boucicault in a barroom on
Bowdoin Square in Boston and, as I looked at him in awe and homage, I
had little thought of ever being bold enough to challenge any of his
theories. Dion Boucicault was a great playwright of the eighties, a man
of sound knowledge of his craft, but like the best of us there were
occasions when he talked nonsense.

Plays are written by their authors. They are good plays or bad plays
depending almost wholly upon the degree of talent of the author plus his
accident of choice of a subject. This goes for pictures as well as for
stage plays. The germ of success is put in only by the original author
in spite of Mr. Boucicault and the combined opinion of the Managers’
Association and the motion picture industry. I am stating here an
important fact upon which I have a great deal of special information. I
doubt if any man alive has ever been called in as a play doctor more
frequently than I, and for the good of my soul I am willing to admit
that I have very rarely saved a patient. I have often seen plays helped
by careful and skillful revision but I have never once seen a play built
into a real success unless the germ of that success was firmly planted
by the author in his first manuscript.

Frequently I have seen, so frequently as to have learned to be in dread
and horror of the practice, sensitive and beautiful plays and picture
stories so coarsened and debased by the rough hands of managers,
directors, supervisors and other quacks, that all hope of success has
been dosed and purged out of them. I am stoutly of the opinion that if
no changes at all in original manuscripts were ever made the percentage
of success both in plays and pictures would be infinitely higher. This
does not in the least mean that I think the author is always right. Of
course he isn’t. Play writing is the most difficult form of all the
forms of literary expression, and no man ever wrote a perfect play. But
I think the trained writer knows more about his business than any one
else can hope to know, and I think it is as silly for an outsider to
meddle with his work as it would be for a kind neighbor to write a few
helpful words in the middle of the prescription you have paid a
physician to prescribe for your sick child.

Every one in the world is, I suppose, a potential story-teller. I am
constantly being asked to read plays written by elevator boys,
maid-servants, policemen and taxi drivers, and it is not surprising that
when a man finds himself in power over a writer he should at once demand
a share of the joy of the creator. But to me play writing is and
scenario writing ought to be a definitely understood and carefully
studied profession; and the outsider without special knowledge or
special talent who undertakes to turn out a masterpiece is in exactly
the same position to do good work as the Irishman who had never tried to
play the violin but had always thought he could do it.

Even in editorial rooms, where a higher class of intelligence is usually
found in authority over the story departments, one notices this
instinctive urge to get a finger into the pie and the theater is cursed
with it; as the picture business is superlative in all things this very
human failing may be found here in its fullest flowering. Just as Tom
Sawyer’s young friends all wanted a turn at whitewashing the fence so do
the picture executives—supervisors, directors, script-girls, cutters,
film-editors, messenger boys, stage-hands and scrub-women—all yearn to
make just the least little bit of a change in a story to satisfy some
instinctive lech to be an author. I have seen so many plays and screen
stories ruined by this enforced collaboration that I honestly look upon
it as the major evil that threatens a young writer’s success.

In the first place it’s a silly custom because once the author
surrenders the integrity of his story he is helpless to even be a fair
judge of the hybrid product that takes its place, and as plays and
stories do not succeed on account of their structural perfection but by
virtue of their spiritual and inspirational qualities, it is obvious
that no man without a creative talent has any right to mess about with
them.

Duncan knew the folly of all this and his skill and instinct resulted in
a fine and sensitive performance.

Again a play of mine was to have its first performance at a holiday
matinée and again, as had happened to me during the first matinée of
THROUGH THE BREAKERS, I was to be given the benefit of an honest lay
opinion of my talents. We opened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, famous
among people of the theater for drawing the prize boob audiences of
America. An audience at any seashore resort is a terrible thing, but in
Asbury Park for some reason its reactions are amazing. Good plays die
and terrible plays are heralded as great, so that the wise author simply
sits in suffering silence with cotton in his ears. Personally as I sat
with my wife through this first performance of THE DETOUR I had been
very happy, so happy in fact that I neglected the cotton, and on my way
out of the crowded theater I heard the first critical opinion of this,
the first attempt on my part to write of life simply and honestly. “Do
you know,” remarked a very pretty young woman as we passed, “I think I
could write a better play than this one myself.” In spite, however, of
this completely honest expression of opinion THE DETOUR gave me a new
standing as a writer of serious plays. Another rusty old saw of the
trade is the one about all the great plays resting in closets, trunks
and unread in managers’ offices, plays so fine that, were they to be
produced, a new drama would spring full grown into being. I have been
looking for one of those for twenty years, but so far it has escaped me.
In all the hundreds of these neglected manuscripts that it has been my
sad fate to have read I found just one real play. When I demanded a
hearing for it and got one, it turned out to be just fair. There is a
real utility about a great play that sooner or later will bring it to
the stage; some one will see it and rave about it and it will get its
chance. It isn’t so difficult to tell a really great play when one reads
it, or a really bad play, it’s the in-between it is difficult to judge,
the degree of badness or of value that means failure or success. Careful
reading of these supposed masterpieces will usually prove rather a
shock. I’ve read a thousand, and I am not the man I was.

The Great War was over by this time and the changes it had brought about
in our moods and our standards was being sharply reflected in the
theater. The motion pictures, successful as they had grown to be, had
not as yet challenged our right to existence and we had begun to produce
something in the nature of an American Drama. Eugene O’Neill had written
several fine plays. Arthur Richman’s AMBUSH, Gilbert Emery’s THE HERO
and my THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were at least a step toward a true folk
play and the rise of the Theatre Guild and of Arthur Hopkins, who to me
has always seemed the great man of the theater in my time, gave fine
promise of fine things.

The Great War had disturbed and sobered me. I was about forty-two years
old at the time America entered it, fat, near-sighted and cursed with a
gouty constitution. Quite obviously I couldn’t fight, and yet, like all
men who stood just across the border line from heroic action, I had my
moments of longing and resentment; here was a big thing and I couldn’t
be part of it. I had been a sort of adventurer all my life and yet when
the greatest adventure of all time was going on I must stand on the side
lines.

Fate had decided that I was to have no real connection with the war. I
was too old, and my two boys were too young. The nearest I came to the
feeling of personal participation was when my youngest brother, Colonel,
then Major, Robert P. Davis, sailed with his regiment for France. My
peace of mind received one slight shock, however, when my oldest son,
Donald, then not quite fourteen, slipped away from Yonkers, where we
were living at the time, and enlisted in the Navy. Exactly what might
have come of that I never will know, for when the young man was marched
with a squad of volunteers to the Battery and lined up before the keen
eye of an officer, he was rudely yanked out of line and sent home to me
with a stern warning which frightened me very much but made no dent at
all in the culprit’s armor. He felt no repentance at all but furiously
cursed the United States Navy for not knowing a good man when they saw
one.

After the war a writer faced a new world. The changes in the form of
play writing speak volumes of the change in our mode of thought and our
standards. When I had written my first plays in the early nineties,
asides were freely spoken. I had frequently written scenes in the old
days in which the lovely heroine sat calmly in a chair, violently
struggling to pretend not to hear the villain and his fellow
conspirators who plotted her undoing in loud voices at a distance of six
feet. The soliloquy was also in good usage, that marvelous aid to the
clumsy craftsman by which all necessity for a carefully reticent
exposition could be laughed aside. I used to start a play, for example,
with a lady alone on the stage as the first curtain rose. She would
perhaps turn sadly away from the window and looking the audience firmly
in its composite eye would exclaim: “Poor John; I wonder if he knows
that I have been untrue to him.” This naturally saved a lot of time and
had a distinct advantage from the audience’s point of view. They had
very little excuse for not knowing what the play was all about.

Deeper, however, than any change in the shifting methods of play writing
was the change in the point of view of our audiences. The “Prodigal Son”
story, the “Cinderella” story, and the “Magdalen” story seemed to have
lost their power; the old one about, “My son shall never marry a
daughter of the Hoosis’s” no longer bit very deep, and the poor
dramatist had to learn all over again.

I can best explain the change that twenty years had brought by telling
of an experience I had with a play called DRIFTWOOD. I wrote this play
in 1905 and read it to a famous star of that time; the lady liked the
part and urged her manager to produce the play, but after long
reflection he decided against it on the grounds that the heroine of my
play had made in her youth what the French writers so politely describe
as “a slip,” and in his experience it was out of the question that any
audience could ever be willing for her, no matter how deep her
repentance, to marry a decent man. Twenty years after I dug this old
faded manuscript out of a trunk and was struck by some scenes of what
seemed to me to be of real power and truth, and again I took it to a
great woman star, whose verdict was “It didn’t seem to her to be about
anything worth making such a fuss about.” And she was as right in her
opinion as the manager of the old days had been in his.

After the production of THE DETOUR I attacked my work from a slightly
different point of view, and my next job was the very pleasant one of
making for my old friend, William A. Brady, the American adaptation of
THE INSECT COMEDY, which was produced as THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. I
followed this with ICEBOUND, which won for me the Pulitzer Prize in 1923
and caused me to be selected as a member of the National Institute of
Arts and Letters.

I had some adventures with ICEBOUND before I got it on the stage and got
myself into a terrible mess that grew deeper as its success grew more
assured. David Belasco had seen THE DETOUR and had written me that if I
could write another play as good he would gladly produce it at once. I
sent him the manuscript of ICE BOUND as soon as I completed it, and in a
few days had a telegram from him saying that he liked it very much and
asked me to see Mr. Roder, his manager, and arrange the details of a
contract. The next day I called on Ben Roder, whom I had known for many
years, and he offered me a contract containing a clause giving Mr.
Belasco the right to produce the play at any time during the next two
years. Mr. Belasco was away with David Warfield’s production of THE
MERCHANT OF VENICE and Mr. Roder was a bit impatient of my objection to
the clause I have mentioned. I have always been in a hurry all my life,
and I had caught from Al Woods during my long association with him his
ardent desire to see a play on the stage the very moment he falls in
love with it. Neither yesterday nor to-morrow ever meant very much to
me; to-day has always been the right time to produce any play that I had
faith in. This fact is so well known to the men with whom I do business
that it is no longer necessary for me to tell them that if they want to
do a play of mine at all they must start casting it the very hour after
they have first read it. Mr. Roder, however, was not quite used to my
rather stormy manner, and the result of our talk was an angry outburst
on my part.

“Mr. Belasco,” I said, “will give me a contract before noon on Monday
for an immediate production or he can’t have the play.” Such language is
all out of line in the Belasco office, and Mr. Roder smiled a kindly and
tolerant smile as I walked out of his office, merely remarking that he
didn’t think I was quite crazy enough to turn down a Belasco production.
I have always been a free lance in the theater and perhaps a bit
militant in my stand for an author’s rights and his prerogatives, and I
made up my mind to go through with my bluff unless Mr. Belasco came to
my terms. On Monday I would sell my play to some one else. With this in
view I took all four of my remaining manuscripts under my arm, and by
noon I had placed three of them with managers of good standing, in each
case saying that the play must be purchased by Monday noon or not at
all, in each case walking out of the office followed by an exact
duplicate of Mr. Roder’s tolerant but unbelieving smile.

It was noon and I was hungry, so, with my remaining manuscript tucked
into my overcoat pocket, I dropped into the grill room of the old
Knickerbocker Hotel for lunch. During lunch young Max Gordon, whom I had
known since his boyhood, sat down for a moment at my table for a
friendly chat. Max Gordon and Al Lewis had been successful vaudeville
agents and had recently owned interests in several plays, but as yet had
made no productions under their own names. Max was always of an
inquiring turn of mind and very little escapes him. One glance at the
yellow envelope sticking out of my overcoat pocket was enough.

“How’s your new play?” was his first start. His second was to calmly
stretch out his hand and take my last manuscript out of my pocket and
transfer it to his own. “I’d like to read it,” he blandly observed, and
in spite of some protest on my part he walked out of the room with it in
his pocket. I had already covered the three managers who, aside from Mr.
Belasco, had seemed to me to be best fitted to produce this play and I
went home. The next day being Saturday, I went up to St. Andrews for my
usual week-end game of golf with my golfing partner, Bob Davis, Bob
being no blood kin of mine but a very dear friend of many years’
standing. Sunday morning the bell of my apartment rang and Mr. Max
Gordon walked calmly in and dropped a thousand dollars on my table and
blandly announced that “we are going to produce ICEBOUND.” Questioned as
to the “we” part of it he replied that Sam Harris and Al Lewis had read
the play and that Mr. Harris had offered to put it out under his trade
mark with Lewis and Gordon as silent but active partners. Sam Harris
could then, as he could now, have anything of mine he wanted, so I
promptly shook hands and called it a trade.

Then the storm broke. By ‘phone, by letter and by telegram every one of
the managers whom I had given until Monday noon to buy my play sent
messages that they would produce it, and it took me about five years to
square myself.

As a matter of fact I have never been able to see the justice in the
trade custom of never submitting a play to more than one manager at a
time. If I own a house and want to sell it, I give that house to more
than one agent, and the grocer who displays a particularly fine melon on
his stand doesn’t consider it the property of the first customer who
admires it. Before it’s anybody’s but his some one must pay good money
for it. Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never
lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he
is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in
the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he
allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent
expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes.


[Illustration:

  ROBERT H. DAVIS
  (_Photo by F. X. Cleary_)
]


I first learned of the fact that ICEBOUND had won the Pulitzer Prize
from Al Woods, who called me up and told me the news. He was, I think,
as much excited as I, and perhaps he knew better than any one else what
a far cry it was from our old Bowery melodramas to the winning of the
prize for the best play of 1923. A lot of water had flowed under the
mill in those twenty-five years, and to throw so completely aside a
hard-won method and adopt another so radically different was a very
difficult thing. Since then I have served several times on the committee
to award the prize, and I have never voted to give it to a dramatist
without recalling my own pleasure in listening to Al Woods’ voice over
the ‘phone when he called up and said: “Listen, sweetheart, who do you
think cops the Pulitzer Prize this year?—you’d never guess—neither would
I—a guy told me—it’s you!”


[Illustration:

  Owen Davis and his two sons, Donald and Owen, Jr.
  (_Photograph by Atlantic Photo Service_)
]


During the run of ICEBOUND Bob Davis ruined a golf game by telling me
about a new story he was about to publish. It was, so he told me,
written by E. J. Rath, but, as a matter of fact, it had in all
probability sprung from his own amazing mind, as have literally hundreds
of other stories that have appeared under the names of our most famous
writers. Bob has been for many years the dry nurse of American fiction
and responsible for the present fame of more successful novelists and
short story writers than any one man who has ever lived. This story that
he called _The Wreck_ bored me very much and quite ruined my game, as
Bob usually saves his loudest and most startling statements until I am
at the top of my back swing; so to keep him quiet I told him to shut up
and I’d read the fool thing if he would send it to me. When I read the
proof sheets, all I could find there was a very amusing character, but
urged on by Bob I finally agreed to try my best to make a play out of
it. The play was THE NERVOUS WRECK, probably one of the most successful
farces of the last twenty years.

As soon as I finished this play I took it to Sam Harris, who read it
promptly and told me it was terrible. As I fully agreed with him, we
decided to have it tried out on the west coast, figuring that the
further we got it from the sight of our friends the better. Mr. Harris
had at that time some business relations with Thomas Wilks of Los
Angeles, and the play was announced for production by him. After the
first rehearsal Mr. Wilks’ stock company went on strike and refused to
play the thing, saying that it was without a doubt the worst play ever
written by mortal man. It was only after a battle that they were forced
to continue.

Mr. Edward Horton who first played the part has since told me that he
was never in his life so startled as he was by the screams of laughter
that followed his first scene, and he and the leading lady got together
after the first performance and hastily learned their lines, a thing
that up to that time they had not thought it worth while to do. The
farce played in Los Angeles for twelve weeks to enormous business, but
Mr. Harris and I were still a bit doubtful and rather reluctantly
started to put together a cast for an eastern tryout. We put it on in
Atlantic City with Mr. Horton and Miss Frances Howard, now Mrs. Samuel
Goldwyn, in the leading parts. After the first performance Mr. Harris
confided in me that he had always thought it the worst play he had ever
seen and that now he was sure of it. I had very little if any more faith
than he had, and we returned to New York together in disgust. But to our
amazement the fool thing did a big week’s business and we decided to see
it once more during the following week in Long Branch. At Long Branch we
saw it before a half empty house and decided we would close it up, and
that I would work on it at my leisure.

I re-wrote it completely seven different times, and each time Mr. Harris
liked it just a little bit less. It kicked around the office for a year
before Al Lewis picked it up in an idle moment and insisted on our once
again tempting fate with it.

The third cast we selected for this outcast of ours was headed by Otto
Kruger and June Walker. Otto said it was terrible and almost walked out
on us, but at last we got it on in Washington, where Mr. Harris said he
would come to see it with an unprejudiced eye. This time he only
remarked that he’d be damned if he knew why he had ever bothered with
the thing, but if it was any fun for me to mess about with such truck he
had no objection to my seeing what I could do. Messing about with a
farce isn’t exactly fun, and I almost killed myself working over it.

During the next week in Baltimore, Mr. Harris wired me that a failure at
his New York theater was leaving his house dark, and that he had booked
THE NERVOUS WRECK to open there the following Monday. By that time I had
the play in pretty good shape. Al Lewis, Sam Forrest and I had been at
it night and day, but I had no last act at all. A farce without a last
act is a pretty sad affair, and one night in desperation I remembered a
hot comedy scene I had in an unproduced farce called THE HAUNTED HOUSE.
I promptly pulled the scene bodily out of one play and stuck it into
another.

This scene, the examination of some cowboys on a ranch by a young
eastern highbrow who used the methods of laboratory psychology, made the
play’s success, but left me in an awful mess when the time came to
produce THE HAUNTED HOUSE, which was now without any last act at all.
One act, however, has always been a little thing in my life, and I stuck
something in the hole left by the missing scene, and with the late
Wallace Eddinger in the leading part, THE HAUNTED HOUSE did well enough
for a season.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            ────────────────
             CHAPTER VI ◆ HOW TO WRITE THREE HUNDRED PLAYS
                            ────────────────


I love farce, but of all the forms of dramatic writing it is by all odds
the most difficult and demands more hard work and more technical
dexterity of the writer than any other.

A good farce, in the first place, must have a plot that could as easily
be told as a tragedy, and a character not only essentially true but
completely familiar to any audience; and it must have at least three
times as much situation in it as any other type of play.

We hear a lot of late of the technique of play writing, and I have grown
a bit impatient of some of the dogmatic drivel laid before the eyes of
would-be dramatists. In reality the dramatist sails on uncharted seas.
There is no master to whose word he can bow, and no oracle to whom he
can submit his questions. The only way to write a good play is to make
it good. If I were asked to put into one sentence the result of my
experience as a writer, I should say: “Dream out a story about the sort
of persons you know the most about, and tell it as simply as you can.”

Of course, rules for play writing don’t mean anything, not even that the
writer who lays down the rules ever uses them himself. He may be like
the cook who prefers to go out to lunch, and yet I have picked up one or
two tricks, short cuts, easy ways to do hard things, and I am going to
write a few of them down in the faint hope of their being of some slight
help to a beginner.

Of course, the usual way to learn to write is by repeated failure, by
doing almost everything so badly that the awful consequences are so
deeply burned into one’s memory that each disaster has resulted in being
so terrified of one particular blunder that it can never be repeated.

Technique is, as I understand it, simply a facing of certain facts, a
realization of some mistakes, a summing up of some experiences of one’s
self or of others, into an expressed formula. I think I believe in that.
It is a good thing to know thoroughly all the rules of play writing
(only there really aren’t any). These rules, the result of one’s own
experience or the theories of others should be carefully learned, and
then twice as carefully forgotten. Conscious technique in any art is
very painful. The sculptor knows that under his clay are the trusses to
hold up his figure, but he doesn’t let them show. It might be well to
note, however, that if he forgot to put them in, his beautiful figure
would be a shapeless mass on the floor.

Of course, the man who knows the most about play writing doesn’t write
the best plays, but quite as surely knowing a little about his trade
isn’t going to hurt him. I quarrel sometimes with my friend, M. L.
Malevinsky, over the real value of this special knowledge. To me play
writing is almost entirely an emotional thing, and in the foreword I
wrote for his quite remarkable book on THE TECHNIQUE OF THE DRAMA I
tried to express my feeling of the limitations of technical knowledge by
writing: “It is probable that the hedge sparrow has quite as much
technique as the meadow lark, but only the song bird can sing.”

If you care to read the few observations I am about to write down, read
them with the thought that they aren’t meant to be too slavishly
followed; they are not words of wisdom at all, they are simply scars
from the battlefield, and they are only meant as a sort of protective
mechanism to save your fingers from being burned as deeply as my own
have been.

                  *       *       *       *       *

1. Don’t write at all until you have something you are sure is worth
writing about.

2. Don’t make notes. Anything one may possibly forget isn’t worth
remembering.

3. After your story has shaped itself in your mind, tell it to yourself
over and over and over again—then try it on some one else. Wives are
good; they have to stand for it. Let the first thing you put down on
paper be an outline narrative of your play, written in two hundred
words. If your story won’t go into two hundred words, throw it away. The
next step is to write several more outlines, at first in narrative form.
Later put in a little dialogue, not probably to be used in your final
copy, but to give you a growing acquaintance with your characters.

4. Modern plays are about how characters react to situations, not about
situations in themselves.

5. Be absolutely sure of your last scene before you write a word of your
first act. Paul Potter, a master of the form of play writing, was the
first to tell me that the French dramatists always wrote their last act
first. I have never quite done that, but I do try to know exactly what I
am going to do with my characters at the end of the play before I start
out. One of the oldest mechanical rules of play writing is, Act 1 plus
Act 2 equal Act 3. I have altered that a little in my own work, and I
think I could express it as: the characters of Act 1 multiplied by the
emotions of Act 2 equal Act 3. A play really is a character driven by an
emotion along a definite line to a definite end. Mr. Malevinsky states
somewhat the same thing. I fully agree with him that every play
expresses a definite emotion, but I do not think the author is or should
be conscious of the fact. In the end any carefully written play results
in a story line marked out by one character, driven by one dominant
emotion to the definite climax of that emotion—success, failure, love,
death, whatever it may be. But if one wants a successful play, it must
have an ending absolutely made imperative by what has happened in the
first part of your story, plus what has happened in the second part. If
two-thirds of the way through you have a possible choice as to the
outcome, you will have a failure every time. Authors write first acts
and second acts, but the audience writes all good last acts. A modern
audience cares very little whether your play ends happily or not, but
they insist upon its ending along the line you yourself have started it
on, and audiences know a lot more about play writing than any dramatist
ever knew.

6. Don’t try to tell of the sort of life you don’t know anything about.
If you know the little girl next door, tell a story about her—forget the
King of France.

7. If, after you have written a speech, and read it over and find it
sounds very beautiful to you, cross it out; beauty in the modern play is
in the thought, not in the words. This is a tough lesson for us
old-timers to learn, and to this day the last thing I do before I send
my manuscript on its first journey is to comb it over for stray
“effective speeches” or bits of bombast, once my specialty and now my
bitterest enemy.

8. Don’t give a thought as to how big or how little your cast is, or how
much or how little your production is going to cost. If it’s a good play
it can’t cost too much, and if it’s a bad one it can’t help it.

9. Get yourself in the habit of reading over all you have written
previously before you start each day’s work, and as the manuscript grows
force yourself to be more and more critical of what you have done. A
play should consist of at least a hundred thousand words, twenty
thousand on paper and eighty thousand in the waste basket.

10. Don’t worry about how long it is going to take you to finish your
task; it doesn’t matter. Some days you won’t be able to write at all,
and other days you can’t stop writing. I have written through hundreds
of lunch and dinner hours and thousands of business and social
appointments. Don’t let any one bother you when you are writing or
anything. If the ‘phone rings, don’t answer it, and if your wife rebels,
divorce her. Nothing and nobody is important when the thoughts are
boiling. Nobody expects a dramatist to be a respectable member of
society, and any crime is justified. If you find yourself bored at your
desk go and play golf, play anything, but stop writing. If you find
yourself in your stride keep at it. I wrote one entire act of THE DETOUR
without getting up from my chair, sixty-five hundred words in longhand
in eight hours. Teach yourself this trick of crawling into your shell
like a mud turtle and letting the world roll by.

I have developed a habit of concentration until it is an almost idiotic
habit. When I have a play in my head neither time nor space exist for
me. I am forced to keep a car and a man to drive it because I have so
trained my mind to focusing that the moment I sat back in a seat on the
subway it was a foregone conclusion that I would be put off the train at
Van Cortland Park when I lived on East 63rd Street. For a time I tried
driving a car myself, but no sooner did I find myself on a straight road
than my mind clicked back on its job of play making until I drove into a
ditch or ran through a traffic light. At length I was persuaded to give
up driving, not entirely out of respect for the law, but because the
roars of outraged traffic cops disturbed my train of thought.

Some years ago my wife was taken to the hospital for a critical
operation and I spent the most horrible day of my life awaiting a
verdict that meant life or death. At length I was allowed to see her for
five minutes and told to go home and not to return until late the
following day. Absolutely broken by what I had been through I returned
to our empty rooms; it was ten o’clock at night; sleep was out of the
question. I sat at my desk making marks on a pad of paper. Suddenly I
was struck by, of all things, an idea for a farce, and I started to
write. Sometime later I had a feeling of fatigue, and I sadly said to
myself: “I’m getting old. I’m not the man I was.” Then I noticed that,
although my lights were burning, it was broad daylight outside. I looked
at my watch and discovered that it was two o’clock. I had been writing
for sixteen hours. When Mrs. Davis came back from the hospital two weeks
later I had written, sold, cast and started rehearsals of EASY COME,
EASY GO, and she was rather curious as to where this stranger had come
from.

I wrote a melodrama called HER MARRIAGE VOW in three days, many years
ago, and it played three years. On the other hand, I worked eleven
months on THE NERVOUS WRECK. Time doesn’t mean a thing. Any good
newspaper man will tell you that if he couldn’t turn out three thousand
words of copy a day he couldn’t hold his job. A play is seldom more than
twenty-one thousand words, seven days’ work if you want it to be, seven
years’ work if it happens to come that way.

As a matter of fact, I figure that it takes me one hundred hours to
write a play, which, of course, can be one hour a day for one hundred
days, or ten hours a day for ten days; but please note that my trick is
never to start writing until I have solved every problem, drawn every
character and completely laid out my story line. The trick of carrying
all this in your mind with absolutely no notes to fall back upon is
rather a difficult one to master, but it is, I am sure, of great value.
What really happens is that in the course of the weeks you go about with
this junk shifting about in your head, the sub-conscious part of your
mind does most of your work for you, and when you start to write it out
you will be amazed to read what your own hand has written.

When I am writing, I make it a rule to go over my story fully in my mind
just before I go to sleep and to start writing the next morning before I
have read my mail or even the morning papers. Very often points are
clear to me that were clouded the night before, and I find that the part
of my mind that remained active while I slept has been helping me to pay
the rent.

There is a great difference between inspiration and imagination, and
although I believe in inspired writing—that is, I believe that some men
and women upon some fortunate occasion write from an emotional prompting
deeper and finer than their conscious mind could inspire—I do not
confuse the mental pictures of an imaginative mind with so exalted a
word. There are and always have been two sorts of writers, the writer
who tells what he sees, or has read or thought or been told, and the
writer whose mind is a sort of old-fashioned kaleidoscope that forms
little mental pictures quite without conscious effort. In other words,
one writer uses trained observation, and the other has the gift of
spontaneous creation. I have on several occasions seen the story line of
an entire play laid out before me in one flash at a time when I, to the
best of my knowledge, was not thinking of any such thing at all. I can,
on a bet, at any time close my eyes and shake my head and look up and
tell a story that, so far as I can discover, I have never for a moment
thought of before.

As a matter of fact, this very unusual development of the power of
sub-conscious creation is a terrible nuisance to me, as my mind races
along so easily down any path that I am dragged along after it without
stopping long enough to make sure that this path is the one that taste
and prudence dictate. I often envy the writer who is forced to stop and
build his plot brick by brick, but so far as I know I never work out a
story at all. The story comes to me as Topsy came to an unappreciative
world “born growed.” If a story of mine is challenged by a manager in
whom I have confidence it is no trouble at all for me to say, “Well
then, suppose it went like this,” and rattle off a completely different
fiction. I have never been able to harness this trick of mine, and often
when I have made up a story in a flash and sold it to some friendly
manager I have gone home and started to write it to discover that it
insists upon coming out entirely different, and that the manager who
loved the first one has to recall to me the details of the plot I have
quite forgotten.

Once about ten years ago I read a play that never existed at all to a
famous manager. I had promised him a play, and when the time came to
deliver it I hadn’t had a moment to think of it, so I took with me to
his office an old typed manuscript and gravely read it to him in the
rough, a play that I made up as I went along. The manager liked the play
very much, but when I handed it in a few weeks later he said he had
never in his life seen so many changes made, and that he vastly
preferred the first draft.

11. Keep in mind that no part of a play, and this is especially true of
farce, is effective when it is not convincing. The more belief you
create in your characters and situations, the greater your success.
Truth in play writing is quite as valuable as it is in life, but, just
as in life, there is a limit to the extent to which simple truth telling
may safely be indulged in. When Hamlet told the players to “hold the
mirror up to nature” he was quite aware that when they looked in that
mirror they would see a reflection, not nature itself. In the arts,
truth is art, but it isn’t always true. We value a play either because
(1) of its truth, (2) of its wide departure from the truth, or (3)
because of a romantic desire excited in us that these related incidents
should be true.

We, the audience, must follow each step of a play with full belief in
that step, but where the dramatist’s skill comes in is in being able to
make of himself such a glamorous and subtle liar that what he feels to
be true becomes the truth. It is the same with any of the arts of the
theater; our skillfully placed lamps give us a feeling of sunlight, but
they are not the sun. The great actor doesn’t die before your eyes, but
he seems to die, just as he doesn’t live, he only seems to live. For a
while, here in America, we playwrights fell very much under the Russian
influence and rather wandered about in a fog. “Why?” we asked, “should
this play be a failure? Isn’t it true?” The answer was of course that
the probability is that if it had not been quite so laboriously true it
wouldn’t have been quite such a bore. Bad smells are true, rainbows are
lies. No man has ever put wisdom into simple and understandable words
better than Shakespeare did and Hamlet’s advice to the players remains a
marvelous guide both to the actor and the dramatist. “Hold the mirror up
to nature” but show it reflected—a mirage.


[Illustration:

  OWEN DAVIS, JR.
  Actor
  (_Photograph by Underwood & Underwood, Chicago_)
]


[Illustration:

  DONALD DAVIS
  Playwright
  (_Photograph by White Studio_)
]


12. I have often been asked what was the most valuable trait in the
equipment of the dramatist and I always answer, “Courage.” I put that
ahead of everything but genius, and genius is to me just an expression,
like “plovers’ eggs.” I’ve often read of “plovers’ eggs,” but up to now
I’ve never eaten any. I think I know personally all of the dramatists of
America and many of the best of England. I am sure that there are more
able and talented men and women writing for the stage to-day than ever
before, but Eugene O’Neill is the only one I know with what I would
admit to be genius. I don’t always like Mr. O’Neill’s plays and I never
like all of any of them, but there is always something under them that
the rest of us don’t get. To me he is a mile above the rest of us.

Sidney Howard, Max Anderson and, in melodrama, Bayard Veiller know their
business better than he does, but O’Neill’s plays come from deeper down,
not deeper in his brain as some people think, but from the depths of the
particularly sensitive heart of a particularly sensitive man. So,
leaving genius aside, I think courage the quality most valuable to the
man or woman who expects to win a place in the very odd world of the
theater where there are no standards at all, either mental, moral or
ethical, and where the author must of necessity stand alone against
groups with different and antagonistic interests. From the moment an
author signs a contract for the production of a play until that play has
lived its life on the stage, gone through its course of stock company
and foreign productions and been sold “down the river” and turned into a
moving picture, every single hand that comes in contact with that play
is the hand of a potential enemy. The manager and his staff, the actors
in a group, the scenic artists and the technical departments all have
the power and as a rule they desire to put in a little something by way
of change, something usually that will be to their advantage and
destructive to the best quality of the work.

This of course means fight. An author surely might as well fight and be
licked as to be licked without fighting, and the method adopted by the
experienced street fighter of getting in the first punch is most
earnestly recommended. There is to all these groups but one real hope in
any play—the hope that the author wrote something; if he did, they all,
manager, actor, etc., have a chance for success; if he didn’t they
haven’t. Authors of plays, like dentists, are never popular; nobody
really likes to have them around.

Writers are so different in their method that I hesitate to advise a
course that has been very useful to me, that is to vary the form of
writing often enough to escape the boredom that follows walking over the
same path too frequently. I like to follow a heavy drama with a farce,
and a light comedy with a melodrama. Of course, one man usually writes
one form of play better than he does another; yet even in an age of
specialists, the good marksman should learn to handle all the tools of
his trade, and no man can write deep drama without a sense of comedy,
and most assuredly can’t write farce without a definite note of tragedy.

I have always had a lot of fun writing mystery plays, although a
well-built mystery drama represents a staggering amount of hard work.
The formula is a very exact and very exacting one, and in addition to
its mechanical difficulties the author must not only create an interest
in who committed the crime, but, if he hopes for success, he must make
them fear that some one character dear to them is guilty. In other
words, the mystery play in which one hasn’t gone deep enough into the
emotions to make the audience care who committed the murder is never
successful, no matter how mysterious it may be.

Emile Gaboriau was the master of this form of writing, and to this day
we all more or less faithfully follow his model, although his
complicated plot structure requires more skill and patience than most
modern authors are able to supply. Poe borrowed the formula, as he quite
frankly admitted, and from him it descended to Anna Catherine Green,
whose LEAVENWORTH CASE and HAND AND RING are fine examples of this form
of writing. Jumping again across the Atlantic, we see in the Sherlock
Holmes character, and in Watson’s shrewd “feeding” of that character
strong traces of the Gaboriau style. After these came the deluge: Bayard
Veiller, with his almost perfect THE 13TH CHAIR, several of my own and
many others leading up to the endless stream of mysterious murders,
strange disappearances, midnight crimes, haunted houses, etc., etc.,
etc.

I know hundreds of men who read one at one sitting, but I defy any man
to write one in less than one hundred hours of solid work. When I tackle
a job of this sort, my study looks like an architect’s work room, charts
everywhere, on the wall and tables and even on the floor. I make a chart
for each character, showing exactly where he is, what he says and what
he is thinking of each moment of the play. In this sort of trick
writing, every word one says is extremely likely to be used against him.
Next to rough farce, the writing of a play of this sort calls for more
technical skill and inventive power than any other form of play making.

The only thing I can add to these scattered notes about play writing is
that no one should allow a failure to beat him. There isn’t anything at
all remarkable about having written a bad play; it’s been done before
and it’s going to be done again. It’s writing a good play that is
unusual as the man who bit the dog; he’s the fellow worth talking about.
No matter how much you may be scorned and derided for having written
what you wrote, no matter how sure you may be that you never again will
dare to look anybody in the face—for a dramatist’s failure in the
theater, for some reason that escapes me, seems to carry with it a moral
disgrace and a social ostracism—in spite of this you will get another
chance when you get another play. I have always demanded that each new
play of mine should be judged exactly as though I had never written one
before, and, as I said earlier in this article, the critic must tell the
truth; he may not want to, but if you really have done a good job he
can’t help himself. Critics, like dramatists, are emotional idiots.

Although I remain firmly of the opinion that the talent of the
dramatist, like the talent of the great singer, actor, painter and
musician, is a thing born in them and not to be acquired by any other
than the chosen few, I know that love and appreciation of the theater
may be taught and hidden talents discovered and developed. When in my
college days I was running one hundred yards in ten and one-fifth
seconds I often thought that, in spite of the fact that few men alive at
that time had me beaten that time, there were probably plenty of young
fellows in the country towns who could have been trained to beat it.
Every boy in the world doesn’t try to run a hundred yards, and of course
many a doctor and lawyer and business man has been born with the gift of
poetry, music, painting and drama and has neglected those talents or
even been quite unconscious of them. These new classes of Dramatic Arts
in the schools and universities will catch any submerged talent and
bring it to the light and beside this they will make cultured audiences,
and in the end good audiences will make good plays.

Our present bewilderment in the theater as to what the public wants
would soon vanish if we had a public who themselves knew what they
wanted and when the day comes when we have a large audience ready to
express the growing demand for mature and adult drama even we laggards
of the theater will hasten to furnish it—we are all of us hungry for
success even to the extreme of being willing to do good work for it.

In November of last year a group of Harvard undergraduates, accompanied
by Professor Parker of the Harvard English Department, called on me, and
at the same time on Winthrop Ames and Lee Simonson and asked us to help
them form a school of the drama in Cambridge. The Harvard faculty seemed
unwilling to provide the desired instruction in the arts of the theater
and since Professor Baker’s withdrawal there had been no Dramatic
Department. Mr. Ames, Mr. Simonson and I called a meeting of Harvard
graduates at the Harvard Club and asked these boys to meet us there and
tell us their troubles and their desires. As a result of that meeting
the Cambridge School of the Drama was organized with a board of
governors whose names read like an all-star cast. At this school
students of Harvard and Radcliffe and a limited number of outsiders may
now take courses in dramatic technique and the arts of the theater.

The faculty of the school is composed of Albert R. Lovejoy, Walter
Prichard Eaton and H. W. L. Dana. The visiting lecturers and board of
governors, each of whom is to lecture once each term and meet the
students for informal talks, are:

Lecturers on play production—Winthrop Ames, Vinton Freedley, Kenneth
Macgowan, Gilbert Seldes, Maurice Wertheim.

Lecturers on drama and criticism—Heywood Broun, J. Brooks Atkinson, J.
W. D. Seymour, H. K. Motherwell, John T. Williams, Isaac Goldberg,
Professor C. T. Copeland, Norman Hapgood, Prof. J. Tucker Murray, Owen
Wister, Robert Littell, H. T. Parker.

Lecturers on stage lighting, scene designing, etc.—Lee Simonson, Robert
Edmond Jones.

Lecturers on play construction—Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard, David
Carb, Philip Barry, Edward Sheldon, Percy Mackaye, Robert Sherwood, S.
N. Behrman, Owen Davis.

Lecturers on the art of acting, etc.—John Mason Brown, Walter Hampden,
Elliot Cabot, Robert Middlemass, Osgood Perkins.

There is a list for you! All Harvard men and all men who have done real
work. I can remember when I was one of three Harvard men in the game.
Now we are getting our new blood from all the great universities. Walter
Eaton told us at one of our meetings that he had listed over five
hundred universities and high schools in the country that were giving
special courses in the Arts of the theater! Does that look like a dying
institution? Five hundred schools turning out each year a flock of boys
and girls who, if they have learned nothing else, have learned to love
the theater.

To me that doesn’t spell the end of the theater, it means the beginning,
and I am eager to try to teach our own little group all I can before
they get started on their own and get so far ahead of me that I shall
have to turn about and study their methods.

This school, with its staff of real workers, seems to me to be about the
most practical place of instruction established since the day when the
boy in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY was told to spell w-i-n-d-e-r, and then go and
wash it. I know what meeting and talking to such a list of men would
have meant to me thirty-five years ago. Among the warm spots in my
memory are meetings I had years ago with Dion Boucicault, A. M. Palmer,
Daly and Percy Mackaye’s famous father, and these men weren’t trying to
teach me anything, they were trying to get rid of me as quickly as they
could.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                            ────────────────
                CHAPTER VII ◆ THE DRAMATIST’S PROFESSION
                            ────────────────


As time went on I found myself fully versed in all of the troubles that
beset a dramatist and armed against all of them but one. I had learned a
good substitute for patiently waiting for a production by turning out so
many plays that one of them was always on the fire. I had learned, in a
measure, to comfort myself for the present failure with the thought of a
coming success, but no philosophy of mine has ever taught me what could
possibly be done with a dramatist on the opening night of one of his
plays. I have, I think, tried everything, and all that I can be sure of
is that the last way of passing that dreadful ordeal was very much the
worst way I had ever experimented with.

Twenty years ago it was the custom to drag a terrified author before the
curtain at the end of the performance and entice him into telling the
audience how glad he was that they liked his play, and how grateful he
was to the manager, the director, the actors, stage hands, ushers and
stage-door-keeper. This gracious speech being received with some
applause, the poor author went home thrilled by this assurance of
overwhelming success, and woke up the next morning to read that his play
was probably the worst catastrophe of a direful season. This custom of
writers being part of the first night show has gone out—not, I think,
that the authors wouldn’t still be willing to oblige, but because the
managers learned that most of the shows were bad enough without any
added attraction.

Some of our more dignified authors a generation ago used to sit in the
stage box in full view of the audience, but they grew strong men in
those days, and I doubt if there is a playwright alive bold enough to
follow their example. I have tried sitting in the gallery, staying at
home, standing at the back of the theater after the house lights were
lowered, hanging around the stage alley, going to a picture show,
drinking too many cocktails, and walking around Central Park, but so far
I haven’t found a way that wasn’t awful. This night is the climax of six
weeks of hard work, to say nothing of all the effort put into the
writing of the play; it means a fortune or nothing, fame or something
that is almost disgrace, and the poor wretch can do nothing. A forgetful
actor, a careless stage hand, or the blowing of an electric fuse can and
has spoiled many a good play, and all that he can do is suffer.

There is no second chance for a play; if its first night in New York is
a failure it is dead forever. Luckily the first night audience, supposed
to be so hard boiled and over critical, is the easiest audience in the
world to sweep off its feet and the most generous in their real joy in
the discovery of a good play. Tough they are at first, but the moment
they get a feeling that something worth while is happening they go along
with you with a whoop. I have fallen down plenty of times, but the kick
that has come to me when I have put one over is worth a lot. Any way I
figure it I am ahead of the game.

This first night audience is a very powerful factor in deciding the fate
of a play, and the “thumbs down” of the old Romans was no more final
than the harsh laugh that follows some shabby bit of sentimentality or
some bit of hooey philosophy. Many authors and managers of late are
trying to fill their houses on a first night with a more friendly crowd,
thinking, like the well-known ostrich, that they are putting something
over, but they forget that mass psychology is a very curious thing, and
that if a man puts his doting mother out in front on a first night he is
very likely to hear her voice leading the first cry of “Off with his
head.”

The whole subject of dramatic criticism, either from a first night
audience or from professional dramatic critics, is a very simple one,
but for some reason it is very little understood. As a matter of fact
neither this audience nor the critics’ notices of the following day have
anything at all to do with the real success or failure of a play. In the
morning you open your paper and on the dramatic page you read that your
favorite critic saw a play the night before and made the remarkable
discovery that it was worth seeing—so did a thousand others at the same
time—the fact being simply that it was a good play. The critics’ praise
did no more toward making it good than did the favorable response of the
audience.

Of course many plays are in the balance; some persons like them and some
don’t; but there is little doubt in the minds of trained observers about
the really fine plays, and even less about the really bad ones. A play
comes to life for the first time when it is played before a wise
audience, and their verdict is as a rule both just and final. A good
play can take care of itself, and any fool knows a really bad one—when
he sees it. Any of us, when we go out and buy a dozen eggs, is likely
enough to get a bad one, but we are quick enough to gag over it when we
try to eat it. The critic is simply a man who knows a little more, and
usually cares a little more, about the theater than the ordinary man of
cultivated taste, and he has been trained in a proper manner of
expressing himself.

What he tells his readers about a new play is first the truth. This in
effect you or I could do as well as he does: it was a good play. The
modern critic, however, goes beyond that in his influence upon the
theater by insisting upon an increasingly higher standard both in
writing and in acting, and by pointing out the virtues or the defects in
the performance, instructing his public in what may fairly be expected
of the modern drama. Naturally there are bad critics, just as there are
bad writers and bad actors, and the bad ones do harm, just as the bad
actors and bad writers do.

The first night audience in itself, although still picturesque, has
changed greatly in the last few years. Twenty years ago opening nights
of any importance at all were naturally far fewer in number than they
are to-day, and an opening at Daly’s, Palmer’s, the Lyceum and later at
the Empire, drew a brilliant audience made up of the real lovers of the
theater and the cream of the “four hundred” that then represented New
York society. To be on the first night list in those days meant
something. The first night audience of to-day is very different. First
nights now are rarely social affairs, and the audience is very much more
of the profession, actors, managers, critics, writers and all the moving
picture crowd. These, together with the dressmakers and play agents and
scouts from the various studios on the lookout for screen material, make
up a colorful gathering and they know a lot about theatrical values even
if they lack a little of the distinction of the old first night crowd.

During the years I have been going to the theater I have seen some
thrilling first nights, but I have never really been one of the
regulars, as nowadays if one were to try to be present every time a new
play opened there would be very little time for anything else. I recall
distinctly some of the great nights when I have been present, such as
the first performance of THE FORTUNE HUNTER, ON TRIAL, RAIN, WHAT PRICE
GLORY, BROADWAY, BURLESQUE, COQUETTE and many more where a wave of
enthusiastic cheering swept the play into instantaneous success. We of
the theater, I think, when we watch these first nights with an anxious
eye, are apt to forget that the reason a play goes over with a bang is
because it is a good play, or a novel play, or the sort of play that at
that moment is the play the public wants and the play makes the first
night enthusiasm. The first night enthusiasm doesn’t make the play.

My years of almost frantic application to my work had by now resulted in
a fixed habit and I found myself pounding along at top speed long after
the necessity for such effort had disappeared. It is the literal truth
to say that for more than thirty years there has been no time in which I
have not had a play in some stage of its progress on my desk and in
response to long training, my mind continually drops automatically into
retrospective revery entirely without conscious direction on my part.

I was not satisfied with the work I was turning out and decided to make
an effort to take life more easily than had been my habit. I remember
getting quite a thrill out of this evidence of my sanity and prudence. I
had not fully realized how fixed the habits of a lifetime may become and
soon discovered how impossible it was for me to hope to reform.

Before I admitted defeat, however, I made really quite an honest effort
and forced myself to take part in several of the semi-social and
semi-political activities of the theater. I had always refused any
demands upon my time not connected either with my own work or with the
affairs of the Dramatists’ Guild or the Authors’ League, but I now
turned deliberately to these rather remote outlets for my energy. For
the first time in my life I tried to make myself believe that it is as
important to talk about work as it is to do the work itself, an error of
judgment on my part from which my sense of humor rescued me before I had
gone very far.

The most interesting of these activities was the attempt to establish a
National Theatre as it was called, and although the plan failed, I have
always thought the failure was unnecessary. The committee to organize
this National Theatre was selected from the best men of the theater, the
fine arts departments of the leading eastern universities and the
leading social and financial groups of New York. We were to produce one
play a year with special attention to manners and diction and show this
play at moderate prices in all of the larger cities of the country.

At the first meeting at the Astor Hotel, Augustus Thomas was selected as
chairman and from the start most of the active work fell upon his broad
shoulders. Augustus Thomas is by far the best presiding officer I have
ever known, and for years it has been my fate to be obliged to follow
him as chairman, president or mouthpiece of countless societies and
committees; but on this occasion I was content to remain in the
background. I seem to be of use only when there is a very practical
issue, and the National Theatre was a rather altruistic, rather
visionary scheme that seemed to me to be a little out of my range. To me
the thing that helps the theater most is a good show, no matter who
writes it or who produces it or where it comes from; and to me a
well-written, well-played play, produced by the commercial theater, is
far more stimulating than an equally fine performance inspired by some
art group. I have always admired Augustus Thomas; when I first came to
New York in the early nineties he was the outstanding dramatist, and in
fact as a writer of the better type of melodrama no man of my time has
equaled him. Aside from his ability as a writer, he is a man of real
eloquence and of commanding presence, and his control of any meeting
over which he presides always makes me blush at the thought of my own
abrupt and rather arbitrary methods.

Upon this occasion, in spite of the great names on the committee, Mr.
Thomas was given full charge, and it was decided that the first play to
be produced by the National Theatre should be AS YOU LIKE IT, a decision
I heard announced with dire misgivings as I have always thought it a
particularly dull and silly play. I was naturally afraid, however, to
announce any such radical views in that exalted company. A cast was
engaged and the production opened in due time before a brilliant
audience in Washington.

It is an unfortunate fact that even the plays of Shakespeare that have
retained their vitality can only be efficiently done by players who have
been trained to play them, and in this particular case the performance
was not anything to rave over. In fact the curtain fell on the first
performance with that dull thud that always announces failure, and the
audience was cold and unresponsive.

Mrs. Thomas, who had been with her husband through many of his own first
nights, and who had been trained, as all wives of playwrights are, to
give help and comfort to the stricken, hurried backstage as the curtain
fell and found her husband sitting sadly amidst the scenery of
Shakespeare’s famous masterpiece with his head bowed and a look of deep
dejection on his face. Her maternal instinct fully aroused by her man’s
agony, she stepped tenderly to his side and putting her arm gently over
his shoulder she murmured bravely: “Never mind, Gus, thank God you
didn’t write it.”

There was no reason that I could see why the first attempt of the
National Theatre should have ended its existence, but the fact remains
that from that day to this I have heard no more about it and I turned
back to my own work with some feeling of thankfulness. After all, if a
man must be mixed up in a failure, why shouldn’t he have the fun of
being responsible for all of it? and, since a man with a mind trained to
full activity must focus his thoughts on something, isn’t it better
after all that the something should be the activity he knows the most
about?

I don’t in the least know how long a writer is supposed to last. It may
well be that my thirty odd years have been the greater part of my share
although I am sure I should enjoy making it an even hundred, but I do
know that to keep up with the parade to-day a writing man must keep his
eyes wide open and his fingers on the pulse of the public. This is many
times more true to-day than it was in the years before the war, but even
then the critical sense of the public was growing rapidly.

In the old days a playwright’s plots and characters were accepted about
as automatically as the church creeds of the time were accepted, and for
about the same reason; the habit of the average citizen of thinking
things out for himself had not yet grown to its present stimulating
proportion. If both the church and the stage of to-day are placed in a
position where they must fight for their life, surely nothing that is
fine in either of them is in danger. With the bunk gone the truth will
be twice as powerful.

It has always seemed to me to have been Ibsen who sounded the first note
of modern characterization in the drama. Good dramatists have always
drawn good characters, but the accent upon the character and the
character’s propelling force upon the narrative was quite different.
Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Rip, Caleb Plummer, Duston Kirk and
hundreds of others were finely drawn characters, but Ibsen’s Nora not
only lived and moved but she moved the play with her and her emotional
progress marked the progress of the drama.

After the production of THE NERVOUS WRECK I tried very hard to write the
play I earnestly wanted to write, but I couldn’t get it. THE DETOUR and
ICEBOUND were true plays from my point of view, honest attempts to do
the best work I knew how to do. But I had a feeling that the American
drama should express a more optimistic note, that it was, or ought to
be, possible to write of life as truly as plays of that class were
trying to write about it, and yet express the fundamental difference
between our lives and the lives of the people of Middle Europe, whose
dramatists had given birth to the new school of naturalistic play
writing.

I know, as a sane man of middle age, that the lives around me are not
always dull, drab, base or unhappy. I was acquainted with a mother, she
was in fact a member of my own household, who had given up a career for
her children and who was neither heartbroken nor neurotic; her children
weren’t idiots, ungrateful brats or headed either for the gallows or an
early grave. I had seen her make sacrifices for them that were well made
and well worth the making. On the whole in this world I have seen men
and women reap what they have sown, and I have looked closely at life
with a trained eye for a great many years and found it good.

I wanted to say something like this in a natural, true and unsentimental
way and I couldn’t do it. I don’t in the least know why it can’t be
done, but so far it hasn’t been. I don’t propose to take all the blame
for this. I’ll admit that NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL said that
virtue always won out in the end, but before Nellie’s time that
statement had been made in platitude.

It may be that the sugar-coated play has killed the possibility of
optimistic play writing, but I didn’t want to write about life’s being
worth living just to trick a happy ending. I simply wanted to say that
life was worth living because that is the way I have found it. I have
lived fifty-six years very happily. I have been fortunate in having the
sort of wife and the sort of children that have added very greatly to
that happiness. I love my work and as a result I have never had any
trouble in making all the money necessary for comfort and decency. I am
strong and well and those I love are well—why should I write of a
sorrowful world? Yet for some reason every time I tried to write a true
play the note of futility crept into it.

I floundered about for the next year or two, turning out a few plays,
most of which I would have described in the far-off days when I had
worked for the Kentucky Coal Company as “run of the mine.” LAZYBONES had
some good points, THE DONOVAN AFFAIR made money, but always I was trying
for that real play that wouldn’t come.

The best work I did at this time was a dramatization of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel THE GREAT GATSBY. The character of Gatsby made a
strong appeal to me, and here was another chance to do a play with Mr.
Brady, who seemed anxious for me to come in with him once more. The play
was really good, and moderately successful, but here was another time
when the truth was bitter and cruel and hard for the public to take.

Naturally I knew perfectly well when I read this novel that Mr.
Fitzgerald’s ending absolutely killed any hope of real success, but I
have my own theories about dramatizing a novel, and one of them is that
the dramatist is in honor bound not to cheapen or coarsen the original
author’s story. Gatsby was a great lover; for the sake of the girl he
loved he raised himself from nothing to wealth and power. To do this he
became a thief. She was unworthy of so great a love and he died by one
of those absurd ironic chances that saved him from ever knowing her
complete unworthiness. Mr. Fitzgerald knew that for Gatsby death was a
merciful friend, and I felt that I had no right to manufacture a
conclusion that would satisfy a sentimental audience.

As a matter of fact, I do not enjoy working on another writer’s story,
but when I make up my mind to do it I deliberately put myself into that
writer’s place and absorb his mind and style so that I write, as far as
I am able, as he would write rather than as I would write a scene
myself. In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald that was difficult, not only
because I had never seen him, but because he was so much younger than I
that his whole mode of thought and all his reactions to life were
absurdly different from my own. But a faithful dramatist of an author’s
work should, I think, assume that author’s personality and should force
himself into the completely receptive attitude of the believer who, with
his fingers on a ouija board, lets the pencil go where the spirits
direct. The result of this collaboration was a good play, but not a real
success. I have always known that, if I had cared to do it, I could have
made from this material a great box-office hit, but as I have said
before, I think that when one takes another writer’s work, there is an
implied obligation not to alter the mood of it.

This feeling is the reason, I think, why I have never cared to work on a
play with another author, and why I object so strongly to the “story
conference” and the group writing of Hollywood. To me a play is so
essentially a mood and it is so impossible for two human beings to enter
into the same exact mood that all such collaboration is started under a
very real handicap. I can understand being in full agreement with
another writer upon details of plot and even upon shades of character
but the mood that would compel certain reactions from the characters,
that must of necessity propel them along the narrative line in a certain
way, could not dominate two writers at the same moment.

I have had little experience in collaboration but in the writing of
screen stories I do know that no matter how many writers are working on
the same job, only one of them is really doing anything, and, as there
is no established technical form to screen story writing, all that
happens at one of these famous story conferences is that the man with
the most authority writes the story and the others sit around and talk
about whatever subject, if any, interests them at the moment. I can see
how two dramatists might work together to advantage if one were a highly
imaginative writer and the other an expert in form and construction, one
to dream out the play and the other to build it. In fact I know of
several cases where this method has been highly successful but to me all
the joy of creating would be gone if I was forced to share it. Good or
bad, I want my play to be mine, and the thrill that has come to me on
the few occasions when I have been able to look at a play and say: “It
is good, and I did it,” has been a rich return for all the hard work I
have ever done.

At about this time Mr. Winthrop Ames, as Chairman of a Committee of the
Theatrical Managers, offered me the position of political head of their
association, the same sort of job as Judge Landis holds in baseball or
Will Hays in the motion picture field. I had a feeling that my wide
experience in all the branches of the theater gave me some of the
qualifications necessary for this work, and for some time I seriously
considered it. The actors, through Mr. Frank Gilmour, and the Authors’
League expressed a desire that I should try my luck, but in the end I
refused. Mr. Ames promised me full authority, but I could see no way by
which this authority could be enforced. I know the managers very well,
thank you, and any time I ride hard on those birds I want a big club and
the only gun in the outfit. Also I had a strong feeling that the time
hadn’t quite come. A little later some better man will take that job and
save the day.

In spite of my knowing that I was not doing all I ought to do as a
playwright, these were happy and prosperous years. I was very active in
the politics of the theater and very happy at home. My boys were growing
up. Donald was at Pomfret and Owen at Choate, and Mrs. Davis and I sold
our house in Yonkers and came to New York.

Always when I have the least to do I demand the most time in which to do
it, just as when I am not writing at all I insist that I can’t live
without an elaborate writing room, although I know perfectly well that I
have done the best work of my life with a ten-cent pad of paper and the
top of a trunk. In any case, I found the ride to Yonkers too long, and
we once more joined the ranks of apartment dwellers.

As a matter of fact, I have usually found that about the time a writer
starts in surrounding himself with every luxury in the way of an aid to
his work he never does very much with his swell equipment besides
occasionally showing it off to admiring acquaintances. It is quite
probable that the money he earned to pay for his elaborate study he
earned by writing a play on the top of a barrel. I myself have worked in
all sorts of places, ranging from a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom to
a studio library in a pent house in the Park Avenue section. During the
most prolific years of my life most of my work was done at a desk in the
living room of an apartment with two small boys playing about on the
floor and crawling between my legs. It is, I suppose, because I have
always had so much fun with my writing that the members of my family
have never stood in any great awe of my labors, and I suppose the boys
saw no good reason why I should try to keep an amusing game all to
myself, and usually insisted on being let in on it.

Edgar Wallace told me last year that he loved New York and always had a
wonderful rest when he came here. It was, he said, the noisiest city in
the world and the only place on earth where he couldn’t write.
Personally I can write better in New York than I can anywhere else, and
although I am afraid I demand more quiet and privacy as the years go
past, I am still quite untroubled by anything less than a riveting
machine.

Some rather facetious remarks have been made about the volume of my
production, but this same Edgar Wallace makes me look like a drone. When
I am hard at work I turn out about four thousand words a day, usually in
longhand, written with the softest and dirtiest lead pencil that a
nickel can buy. Mr. Wallace tells me that on a good day he dictates ten
thousand words. I know that twenty-three percent of all the novels sold
in England last year were of his writing, and he calmly threw in three
or four plays by way of good measure. Ever since I dined with him I have
laughed with scorn at any one bold enough to insinuate that I write too
much, and I have been filled with good resolutions.

I surely must settle down to work. No matter how much a man may enjoy
his job, every writer in the world has times when he thinks he is
through. It’s part of the game. We all of us have hours of profound
depression when we are afraid of the future and in terror of our own
limitations. We are sure that no good story will ever again come to us
and doubtful if we would know what to do with it if it did. This is
natural enough when a writer has just finished a play or a novel,
because, of course, he has put all he had into it and his mind feels
empty. But this mood often comes at other times, and the best cure for
it is to hang around doing nothing until you happen to read a fine novel
that has just been published or see a really good play—the right play
always sends me out of the theater walking on air, and I go to bed
tingling all over to wake up the next morning with a new hope and a new
determination.

The worst disease, however, that comes to a writer who has been at his
job for a long time is the awful fear of being “dated.” Of course it’s
hard for one of middle age to write of life in any other way than as he
knows it, and equally, of course, our lasting impressions do not come to
us after fifty. I fussed for a while over the fear of getting to be a
back number, and wondered if I could possibly grow to understand what we
were pleased to call “the new generation.” I found, or fancied I found,
a great change in the old world, until I happened to recall that these
changes had been going on since time began. A very careful study of
audiences convinced me that they still reacted to an honest emotion,
just exactly as they always had done, and that the only difference in
the world around me was that the old gods had different names.

To me, with my conviction that as the world goes on it gets better and
more worth living in, it makes no difference at all whether it is the
custom to say “Hail! Cæsar!” or “Hello, Cæsar,” and I very much doubt if
any of our changes are very much deeper than this. We were a sentimental
people, as every race of adventurers must be. Now we have become a very
practical race, hard boiled, if one prefers to put it that way. A little
while ago we slopped over about our emotions because that was the
custom; to-day for the same reason we pretend we haven’t any. Of course
our emotions weren’t any greater because we made a fuss about them, or
any less because we now cover them up. The relationship between men and
women has changed during the last ten years, so had it changed in the
generation before that, and so on back to the time of Adam, but that
relationship then and now was a thing of enormous interest, and a swell
thing to write a play about.

It’s the writer’s business to meet the mood of the hour, and all he has
to do to meet this mood is to learn to sympathize with it. Just so long
as I feel myself a part of the life around me there is no reason why I
shouldn’t keep on writing, and at present I most decidedly do feel that.
If the time ever comes when I find myself bewildered and afraid of a
strange world that I no longer understand, I’ll stop—or rather, on
second thought—perhaps I’ll write a play about how hard it is to
understand it!

At this time I stepped out of my job as President of the Dramatists’
Guild and took the presidency of the Authors’ League of America. This,
as it happens, is not an honorary position, but comes under the head of
honest labor, and during the long fight between the Dramatists and the
Theatrical Managers’ Association that resulted in the present
Dramatists’ contract, I served on all of the many committees in addition
to my work as President of the League. I loved the work; the friendships
I formed among the members of the fighting committees are among the
pleasant and most helpful contacts of my life.

There are about a dozen men and women who mean a lot to me with whom I
have worked for sixteen years to bring about decent conditions for
writers. There are many more than a dozen now who are working faithfully
for the Authors’ League, but often, when I attend one of the meetings
and sit at the crowded council table, I catch the eye of one of the old
timers and wink pleasantly—we can remember years when there weren’t
enough authors around to fill the room with cigar smoke. We used to ask
one another if it was worth while to keep on fighting. James Forbes
always said that this was positively his last effort, but he always came
back; so did the rest of us, all busy men, not one of us needing the
help of any one to get decent contracts. We were proud of our calling
and wanted to advance its dignity and importance, and I think that in
the end our many years of hard work justified itself. The American
Theatre is to-day under a temporary cloud. It may be one year or two
years or three years before its old prosperity returns, but the
Dramatists’ Guild is the strongest and most powerful body of writing men
in the world and there are plenty of strong men of half my age who are
able and willing to keep it as powerful and as sane and moderate as it
is to-day. No matter what you hear don’t for a moment believe that the
prosperity of our theater is not going to return,—the theater is safe
and it always has been. Just so long as little boys instinctively pick
up a stick and become brave knights and gallant soldiers, and as long as
a girl child hugs a doll to her breast and becomes a mother, the theater
will live. A combination of circumstance, novel inventions, stupidity
and greed, plus lack of leadership and the arrogance of organized labor,
has resulted in sad days for many of us, but the turn of the wheel is
already bringing about changes and sooner than most of you are yet ready
to believe better days are coming.

If, when they come, the men who have been the leaders of the commercial
theater have learned their lesson, the temporary setback will have been
worth what it has cost; if they haven’t, they will be forced to step
aside and give up their power to those more worthy to possess it.

The sane, simple and practical way to govern the theater has been
pointed out. Three times already I have served on committees whose
object was to consolidate the interests of actors, managers and authors,
and hand over the authority to a group of twelve, made up from the men
of proved integrity among the three groups. We who have made a long
study of conditions know that this composite intelligence could find a
way to correct the principal evils that have been the cause of our loss
of public confidence and support. Those of the public who really prefer
to go to the picture houses can of course continue to go to them. Wise
men of the theater know that in the end the picture houses are great
incubators engaged in hatching out new audiences for us and that in a
very short space of time we could have a road circuit beside which the
old Stair and Havlin houses couldn’t cast a shadow.

There are, however, some very definite evils in the present state of the
theater and every one of them could be corrected or greatly reduced. The
regulation of the sale of tickets has been taken in hand by a
progressive group of managers and will be corrected if the managers can
be controlled, which is a bit like saying we could do away with evil if
there was no more sin. The unfair and unwise demands of the unions of
stage hands and musicians could be regulated by an honest facing of
facts and a fair presentation of present conditions. No organization has
the right, or as a matter of fact the power, to go beyond a clearly
marked line; the moment any group’s demands become unfair there is very
little difficulty in upsetting that group. It doesn’t demand an
Alexander, it simply calls for a little common sense.

No one of us really wants to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs.
Help from the railroads would follow an intelligent presentation of our
case. Clean theaters would promptly follow in the footsteps of a clean
administration. Box office reform depends upon six words spoken by the
right man with the right authority to back his six words up. Help from
the newspapers does not depend, I am convinced, upon the spending of
millions of dollars, but would follow an honest request for their
assistance based upon the ground of the theater’s cultural and
educational value, always provided that we could show some claim to
cultural and educational importance.

The revival of the road, until such time as the turn of the tide has
made that revival automatic, could be accomplished under wise leadership
that would work for, say, forty decent plays, decently produced,
underwritten by local subscription lists. Any community of a hundred
thousand population will furnish an audience, once they are assured that
there is a certainty of their getting adult entertainment. These aren’t
day dreams; everybody knows them; several times we have banded together
to fight for them. The last meeting called by John Golden of the
managerial group actually had a real grip on this problem, only dinner
time came around and we all went home. If some one were to call a
meeting of a strong group of actors, authors and managers, all
instructed to sit there until they accomplished something, I am sure we
would at last be under way—provided always that no lawyers be allowed at
the meeting and that it be called at a good restaurant.

During my two years with the Paramount Company, my contract reserved
half of my time for my own private affairs and I divided this time as
honestly as I knew how between my duties to the Authors’ League and my
writing. By now my son Donald had finished college and gone to Hollywood
as a staff writer, and Owen had walked out on Professor Baker at Yale,
horned into the theater when my back was turned and secured for himself
the part of the son in THE BARKER with Dick Bennett in Chicago. This
action of his, so his mother informed me, was the most dreadful calamity
of modern times and would undoubtedly bring her in sorrow to the grave,
but if you have ever seen her seated in an audience where this boy is a
member of the cast of players, you might possibly read in her deeply
absorbed face a certain smug satisfaction that would not, I am sure,
make you think of either graves or calamities.

I, being of coarser stuff, never for a moment regretted the fact that
these two boys of ours had insisted upon following in our footsteps; how
could they do anything else? They were born of two stage-struck parents
and had cut their teeth by biting managers who frequented our
establishment. If a child learns anything in the home circle, how could
they help learning about the theater? Their mother knows a little about
things outside its range, but I know nothing else at all, not even
enough to be ashamed of the fact. The great happiness of my life to-day
is that as we grow older, the four of us, we grow closer together, and
that I can talk with my sons of their problems with the authority of one
who knows something about them.

In the fall of 1928 I wrote a play called CARRY ON with a fine part in
it for young Owen. My intentions were good and I am sure he has quite
forgiven me. Later he played in another of my authorship called TONIGHT
AT 12, which was one of the sort of plays often described by Al Woods as
“all right, but what the hell did you write it for?” In both of these,
however, Owen fared better than I, and I knew that he was fairly
started.

In 1928 I turned for a change to the writing of musical comedy and
helped a little on WHOOPEE, produced by Ziegfeld with Eddie Cantor in
the old Otto Kruger part, for WHOOPEE is an adaptation of our old friend
THE NERVOUS WRECK, expertly tailored by Wm. Anthony McGuire.

I also fussed about with LADY FINGERS, a musical version of my old
farce, EASY COME, EASY GO, and wrote a show called SPRING IS HERE for
Aarons and Freedley. SPRING IS HERE, in spite of a good cast and
charming score and lyrics by Rogers and Hart, was only so-so. As a
matter of fact, Bill McGuire and Otto Harbach need not worry; they can
have the musical comedy field so far as I am concerned. Of all the forms
of writing I find it the least interesting and the most difficult; to me
it remains a trick like putting peas up your nostrils, not at all
impossible, but why do it? The mere statement that I soon discovered
that the properly concocted musical show must be dominated by its score
and not by its book is explanation enough as to why a vain old dramatist
can’t rave about this form of expression.


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                            ────────────────
                        CHAPTER VIII ◆ HOLLYWOOD
                            ────────────────


Of late years I have been jumping between the New York theater and the
studios of Hollywood, searching for the old spark of enthusiasm that
made our lives so colorful, and I find Hollywood dull and depressing and
the Broadway theater sad and discouraged. This sounds, I suppose, like
the opinion of advanced age, but as a matter of fact it isn’t. I haven’t
had a minute in the last thirty years in which to grow old and I share
not at all in the pessimism of those who think the theater is doomed or
the optimism of those who think the talking picture is all triumphant. I
am absolutely sure in my own mind that the theater will advance and that
the talking picture will fall back, not to ruin, because it fills a
place in the lives of so many people that nothing can replace. But soon
now both theater and pictures will have a clearly defined audience—a
true drama for an audience that demands a mature form of entertainment
and a fictional entertainment for the millions who demand a
sugar-coating on their pill.

The picture men need not begrudge us this share of the amusement
business because without a prosperous theater they would be in a bad
fix. They are, and it seems to me they must always be, dependent in
great measure on the theater for their raw material. The good play does
not always make the best picture, but a produced play is easier to judge
than an unproduced manuscript, and the highly successful play is always
welcome on the screen.

Then, too, the best training school for actors is not the screen but the
stage, although screen and stage acting are very different and the great
actor of the stage is by no means sure of screen success, while a pretty
girl or good-looking boy with no training at all can frequently do
better work than an actor of long training. In the theater the actor
projects his personality, on the screen the camera projects it—a very
different thing. Still, however, the theater is needed by the screen and
there is no reason for a feud between them. In fact, the dangers and the
problems that confront the theater are less complex than those the
screen is called upon to face. We have but one—to do good plays. I have
another silver cup for any one who can persuade me that a really fine
play has ever failed. On the other hand, ahead of the men who control
the destiny of the talking picture there are many problems, almost
staggering in their complexity. Let me try to state the vital one, from
figures I have carefully prepared.

Twenty percent of the talking picture audience is composed of children.
Another twenty percent consists of persons to whom the English language
is in whole or in part unfamiliar. Sixty percent of the remaining
percentage consists of those with what we may safely call immature
minds, leaving an audience to be thrilled, amused and satisfied in which
persons of a fair degree of culture and taste number some thirty odd
percent. If you care to stop for a moment over these figures, you may
find in them the answer to many of your moments of bewilderment. To
satisfy this thirty odd percent, who do the writing of and the critical
condemnation of talking pictures and at the same time to thrill this
seventy percent who put up the money that makes them possible, is
already a big problem and it grows bigger every day as the novelty of
the mechanical device wears off, and the suitable supply of fiction
becomes exhausted.

Hollywood to-day demands about four hundred good stories every year, and
my third and last silver cup goes to the one who can list for me four
hundred great stories written since the world began. Just for fun I
tried my hand at making such a list, and from a rather extensive
knowledge of the fiction and the plays of both the past and the present
I was able to get two hundred and eight. After that they began to fall
into squads with the precision of well-drilled soldiers and although
many of them told the same story very charmingly it still remained a
twice-told tale.

I had, reluctantly, agreed to make a trip to Hollywood the previous
spring for Mr. Sheehan of the Fox Company, and there I had made for Will
Rogers an adaptation of my friend Homer Croy’s novel, THEY HAD TO SEE
PARIS, for the screen. As a result I had signed a six months’ contract
starting in December. My experience with Famous Players Lasky Company
had been unsatisfactory in spite of the real kindness of Mr. Lasky, and
I felt that under the present conditions an author’s position in
Hollywood left much to be desired. But I had the advantage of an unusual
contract and I had two strong reasons for wanting to see more of
Hollywood. The first reason was that both of my boys were there, and my
wife and I are, I am afraid, rather too dependent on them and never
completely satisfied unless they are near at hand. Then, too, I was
greatly troubled by the difficulty of forming a fixed opinion of
conditions out there and determined to at least satisfy myself that I
understood them. I had never been able to see why a writer in Hollywood
should be forced to deliver up his self-respect, and with it his only
chance of being of real value. I saw both sides of the issue but to me
the pressing need of the only men and women who are trained to write
stories was so great that I thought it my duty, as one who has given a
great part of his life to the effort to improve the condition of the men
and women of his craft, to make an effort to find out if it wasn’t
possible to break down the barrier that has always existed between New
York writers and the studio executives in Hollywood.

Owen was a featured player for Fox and Donald was a staff writer and
stage director. When I left New York I was pledged to a six months’ stay
and had some difficulty in laying out my future plans with the degree of
exactness that has become my habit; we got away at length, however, and
I left behind me only the remains of one “tryout,” a farce called THE
SHOTGUN WEDDING, produced by Wm. Harris, Jr., for a brief tour and never
developed beyond that point, THE SHOTGUN WEDDING was funny, but not
funny enough. Wm. Harris, Jr., is, I think, the best judge of a play of
any man alive, although his critical judgment has been developed to the
same extent that Sherlock Holmes developed his sense of deduction, and
when it comes to discovering a clew to a bad play he could give Sherlock
a stroke a hole.

Mrs. Davis and I joined the boys on the Coast early in December and we
had a very comfortable and happy winter. I made an adaptation of SO THIS
IS LONDON for Will Rogers, worked with Sam Behrman and wrote and adapted
a number of stories. I like writing for the pictures, or at least I want
to like it. It is not at all a difficult form and I can see no mystery
in it. It is just story writing; the difference in technique is no more
different than the step between farce and drama writing and nowhere near
so different as the dramatic form and the modern method of building
musical comedy.

The difficulty with picture writing is and always has been to get what
one writes past one’s immediate supervisor and unfortunately this
depends very little upon the value of what is written. Nowhere on earth
are there so many totems, bugaboos and fetishes as there are in a motion
picture studio and all argument is strictly forbidden. “Yes” is the only
word ever spoken in the presence of the great out there, and an
absurdity once perpetrated by executive order becomes a sacred custom
and part of a ritual.

As a successful dramatist, I had become accustomed to having my opinion
listened to with respect, and my judgment on questions of story
construction was almost always final. I have had many differences with
managers, but never heard of any dramatist who at least wasn’t given a
chance to express his views on the work of his own brain and who was not
consulted upon what was to be written into the story which was to bear
his name. In Hollywood no author is ever considered to be of any
importance at all. He ranks as a clerk to be put at any little job that
comes to hand and after he has written a story, he never can by any
possibility know what will be done to it before it gets to the screen.
This is the outcome of the old days of silent pictures when a director
took a company out on location and shot a story that he made up as he
went along, very much as children who give shows for pins in a barn
invent theirs. The talking picture brought something very like a drama
form but the men in power, who had won their positions by using their
own method, naturally enough prefer to keep on using it, in the first
place because they had been successful with it, and in the second place
because they don’t know any other.

In any study of the motion picture business it is always well to
remember that it is a very wonderful thing to be able to send a show in
a tin can by mail or express to any location in the world, and that the
marvel of these talking figures was for a long time so great that only
the most exacting worried much about what they talked about. If,
however, the writing of picture stories is ever to offer any attraction
at all to a writer beyond the very generous salary he is offered, it is
quite obvious that some change must be made in the present system. Just
now no writer could possibly find any other reason for writing screen
stories than the money he makes out of it, and quite as obviously any
writer with the skill they sorely need can make plenty of money without
going there. Good writers of to-day are well paid and any man or woman
of the reputation for success that they demand is very likely to be in a
position of financial independence that frees him from any necessity of
surrendering his dignity and his integrity. To be sure, plenty of
writers are there now and plenty of others are probably anxious to go.
But, as the good ones come to realize the absolutely hopeless task that
confronts them, they will return to their former tasks, because they
must, if they are ever going to write anything worth writing, preserve
their originality of thought and style. Once they surrender that they
are lost. Then it doesn’t in the least matter whether they go or stay,
they won’t be worth anything in any case.

Hollywood is the strangest and the maddest place the world has ever
seen. It is beautiful; its sunshine, its flowers, its bold sea coast
with the blue Pacific challenging any beauty of Southern France or
Italy, are really thrilling. It is a beehive of activity, it is the most
cosmopolitan city in the world—and the dullest. For some reason one
comes away from Hollywood with that impression stamped firmly in the
memory. It’s a bore. Forget this “wild party” stuff. Don’t pay any
attention to stories of the glamour and excitement of Hollywood. It’s
just a dull place, a grand spot for winter golf, but a wash-out for any
mature person who depends in the least upon mental stimulation; there
isn’t any. The picture business is the second, or the third, or the
first or some such silly number among the world’s industries, which is
probably what’s the matter with Hollywood and with the motion pictures.
They are standardized, circumscribed, advertised and circumcised to such
an extent that all they can do is say “Mamma” when you step on them.

What is easily the best medium by which to gain the ear of the world has
gained it under the splendid leadership of extremely clever and tireless
business men, and, having gained it, doesn’t say anything worth
listening to. The picture business in salesmanship, in organization, in
mechanical and technical development, in direction and in photography is
amazing, and there they stop. They fall down hard on the basic commodity
they are selling; their story product isn’t good enough. They know this,
of course, as well as I do, but they do not know the reason or at least
those of them who do know the reason won’t tell the truth about it
because if they did, it would mean the end of their importance.

They will tell you that their writers fall down on them and that is in
fact true. I have been fighting authors’ battles all my life, but I have
no defense to offer for the New York writer of big name and bigger
salary who goes to Hollywood with a nose turned up in contempt and takes
their money and makes wise cracks at their expense. I see their side of
the case so clearly that for three years I have been trying to do
something to clarify this situation. The barrier between real writers
and the studios is, I am convinced, the greatest obstacle to the advance
of motion pictures and the real trouble I can sum up in one sentence:
“The picture stories are not written by authors, they are written by
executives!”

During the winter in Hollywood I was a guest at a dinner given to
Frederic Lonsdale, the English dramatist, by Arthur Richman. Around the
tables in that room were fifty-four very well-known and very successful
dramatists and novelists of New York and London. These men were there
because they were successful and important men asked to meet and welcome
a distinguished English writer to whom Mr. Richman wished to do honor.
These fifty-four men have written many times fifty-four successful
plays. They were not dated, worn out, or exhausted old fellows in their
dotage, but men in their full swing—Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Max
Anderson, Laurence Stallings, A. E. Thomas, John Colton, Martin Flavin,
Sam Behrman, and many more of the same importance, three Pulitzer Prize
winners, three members of The National Institute; surely here was talent
enough to write good stories. These fifty-four men were almost all of
them questioned by me at some time during the winter and not one of them
who had been writing in Hollywood for over a month could tell me that he
had found it possible to do good work or that he could see any hope at
all of ever being allowed to write the sort of thing that he had been
successful enough in writing to cause the heads of the studios to pay
him his large salary.

I heard stories told not in anger but in honest bewilderment that would
have amazed me had they not been in line with the mass of information I
had been collecting. Thirteen writers of standing had been given the
same story to adapt to the screen, the idea being that bits of each
would be collected by some inspired executive and formed into a
masterpiece. Of course thirteen writers can’t write a story any more
than thirteen cooks can bake a cake. One of the finest dramatists of our
time had been for six weeks working on an adaptation of a novel and at
the end of that time some one discovered that the rights to the novel
belonged to another company. A fine novelist and a really distinguished
dramatist were making over a dated and absurd old melodrama, while a
very famous melodramatic craftsman sat in the next office trying to
dramatize a very light and fluffy novel. The best dialogue writer in
America, who is famous for his brilliant and sophisticated wit, was
writing a Chicago gang war yarn, two very serious men of real literary
taste were working together on a slapstick musical show, while two
famous musical comedy writers were doing their best with an English
drawing-room comedy.

And so it went. These men were well treated as in my experience all
writers have been out there, contracts are always kept to the letter and
salaries are always paid. The stories these writers were working on will
very few of them ever see the screen, and those few will be made over
time and time again under the eye of some supervisor. The assistance of
trained screen writers will be called for and before any picture results
practically nothing written by any one of the fifty-four men at that
dinner will be left. Now I am going to admit that out of these
fifty-four men it is extremely unlikely that there were five who knew
enough about pictures to be able to write a proper “shooting script,”
but I am not going to admit that in that room that night there weren’t
brains and talent and energy enough to have written ten times more
stories and ten times better ones than they ever were allowed to write.

If a ball club was formed of the nine best players in the leagues and
that ball club lost every game, the sporting public would say that it
was the result of bad handling, as of course it would be. If fifty-four
men who have written several hundred good plays can’t write more than
ten bad screen stories in six months my opinion is that they have been
badly handled, and I see no other sane deduction from the facts.

Let me tell you, quite honestly, the usual experience of a writer who
comes to Hollywood for the first time, not my own experience, but that
of practically every man and woman with whom I have talked. The writer
will be pleasantly and kindly received and a meeting will be arranged
with the head of the studio. This gentleman will hand him a play or a
novel and he will be asked to read it over, take a few days to think out
a novel treatment of it, and hold himself ready to be called to a story
conference.

After a day, or two, or three, or a week, or a month or something like
that, for the studios are busy places and the executives’ time is valued
far above rubies, the author is sent for and enters the presence. He is
naturally ready with a carefully thought out method of treatment for the
play or story he has been asked to study and eager to make a good first
impression. Before he can tell his story, however, the executive will
carelessly remark: “Did I tell you the ideas we had for this story?” The
author will naturally reply that nobody has told him anything at all
since his arrival except that “California is the most wonderful place in
the world, and you don’t really mean to tell me that New York is still
there.” Then the executive will inform him that “they” have some ideas
of treatment of that story and perhaps he had better mention them. It
has been decided not to have the scenes laid in China—“there have been
too damned many of those Chink operas lately”—and anyway New York
background is sure fire; the girl mustn’t be engaged to be married to
the Unitarian missionary, she’s got to be the mistress of a side show
barker, and earning her living as a high diver. “Will Hays can talk as
much as he wants to but everybody knows what’s a proper costume for a
high diver.”

Aside from that, and a happy ending, nobody wants to make any real
changes in the story. The author, a bit bewildered but still anxious to
make good here, makes the first concession that results in absolutely
killing any hope of his knowledge and experience being of any value, as
by now his creative power has been entirely pushed aside; he has joined
the ranks of “picture writers” in five minutes.

Armed with the above-mentioned instructions, the author retires to his
office, very probably the first office he ever had in his life, and
starts to work. The studio is always generous in the time allowed,
generous in fact in every way in their treatment of writers, and nobody
rushes our hero who, in the course of time, say, three weeks, during
which he has drawn a salary of from four hundred to six or seven times
four hundred dollars each week, turns in his completed story.

This story is read and another story conference is called. Here the
author meets the director and the supervisor. Every one of course knows
what a director is. Some persons, however, and I am one of them, do not
know exactly what supervisors are. As Mahomet was the Prophet of God so
supervisors are there to add to the power and the glory, and their
voices are softly tuned to utterance of the sweet word “yes.” At this
first group conference it is stated that the story seems hopeless but
stout hearts never despair and ideas begin to be thrown about the room
with an ease that amazes the writer who, owing to the comparative
poverty of his own powers of invention, is quite unable to keep up.

The results of this meeting are a complete recasting of the story. Now
it’s back in China, but with a new set of characters and a different
plot. After three weeks of story conferences, the director confides to
the author that the trouble with this yarn is the supervisor is all wet
and the best way out of it is for the author to come to his house at
night and they’ll begin all over again and get a sure-fire knockout.

In two or three more weeks of hard work the story is ready and, owing to
the great enthusiasm of the director, is “sold” to the studio executive
and his O.K. is put on it. O.K.’s are very important, for without them
no picture can be put into production. At last, however, the story is
ready and the date of production arrives, the author’s story is actually
about to be placed on the screen!—and how! The director, now that the
picture is actually in production, is in absolute power, and he calmly
throws away the story and strings together an entirely different one
that is no more like the script so gravely O.K.’d than it is like the
original one written by the author. Mad as this may seem it is actually
what is being done in every studio.

Some supervisors are good men; they know better, but standing as they do
between the devil and the deep blue sea they drift along. Many directors
know a story, even if very few can write one, but the heritage of power
is very strong and men who in the days of the silent pictures “shot
their story on the cuff” bitterly resent any authority but their own,
and write and produce only the sort of thing that they have learned by
experience how to handle. The great directors, Frank Borzage, Louis
Milestone, Lubitsch, King Vidor and a few others, know story values when
they read them and have so much pride in their work that they can, like
all strong men, afford to have less vanity. Directors from the theaters,
like the De Milles, and others of the men who learned values in the
library and the university, know of course the folly of such childish
story building, but in the great volume of production their share is
small. In spite of this the big man in Hollywood is the director—they
are strong men, tireless, and creative.

The ideal screen story will, I think, always be written by the director
or directed by the writer, the only difference here is in the words. The
man who creates the mood of a story is the author of it, no matter by
what name you call him. I have nothing but admiration for the director
who can write a story or for the author who can direct one, but at
present all directors without exception change and re-write every story
they handle and there are one hundred and eight active directors in
Hollywood. I think it fairly obvious that there are not and never have
been and never will be one hundred and eight constructive story experts
alive at any one time.

In any case, at the present writing the director is king and the writer
is nobody. The opinion of the great of Hollywood as to the importance
and the dignity of a writer was expressed by the head of one of the
large companies who calmly announced during the early spring that he was
about to try a new policy. He was going to discharge all his writers and
engage new ones selected from men who had never written anything in
their lives, to see if he couldn’t get some new ideas.

Aside from the absurdity of sending for a plumber when the baby is sick,
the gentleman forgot that if his “new writers who had never written
anything” had new ideas they would never in the world be allowed to use
them. At present the motion pictures are an imitative and not a creative
medium and I very much doubt if the gentleman ever met a new idea in all
his life.

This is the present system and if its results are satisfactory to the
men who have poured their millions into this industry then I am just
another New York writer trying to tell Hollywood how to make pictures.
If, however, there is any feeling that better work could be done, should
be done, and must be done if this wonderful medium is ever to take the
place it ought to take in our national life, if this advance of two
hundred million is to be held and satisfied, then there is one way to do
it, and only one.

The answer is very simple, so simple as to make it seem silly. Put in
every studio a real editor with full authority. There isn’t one in
Hollywood, and there never has been. Such a man could save each of the
four great studios from half a million to a million a year simply by
killing the impossible junk before it goes into production. Such a man
knows writers and how to make them write. He knows how to make them earn
their salary or how to get rid of them; that’s his business. It’s folly
to say that such men can’t be had. Every great newspaper has one; so
does every big publishing house; and when they die others are found to
take their place. What they don’t know about pictures they could learn.
Every editor learns the taste and wants of the public he serves. Bob
Davis sat in Munsey’s office and picked the fiction for five different
publications with five different classes of readers, and when he
couldn’t find the type of story he wanted, he took a writer to lunch and
in a month he had it.

That’s just an editor’s job. It is possible that even a fine editor
might make some mistakes until he learned the taste of the picture
public, but are there no mistakes made now? What percentage of pictures
produced to-day is satisfactory, even to the companies who produce them?
Think it over! I am one of the few writers who enjoyed writing for the
screen, partly because of a habit I have of laughing at silly people,
and partly because I love to write anything at all. I am not of the
number who couldn’t catch the trick and retired in anger and contempt.
When I left Hollywood in June it was because I “had a play,” and I have
more offers to return there than one man could by any possibility take
advantage of. I am too old a writer and too deeply devoted to my craft
to hesitate to set down the result of three years of thought. I have
never, in the theater or in Hollywood, sold to any man my right to free
speech or freedom of thought and it is rather late for me to change.

It is a curious thing how, in the amusement business, history keeps on
repeating itself. In the years I have been a student of conditions in
this field, I have seen the rise and fall of many different forms of
popular entertainment. The great chain of theaters of the Klaw and
Erlanger Syndicate, the Stair and Havlin circuit of cheap theaters, the
once highly popular stock houses—the Keith vaudeville, the old Columbia
burlesque wheel, the circus, the skating rinks, all of these sprang into
popularity under the guidance of shrewd showmanship. Their amazing
profits drew big investors who poured their money in, building new
theaters, consolidating chains of old ones, enlarging, spreading out.
Then, long before the capital engaged could earn any real return, the
boom was over and the investing public held the bag. There has never
been a year when more money hasn’t been lost in theatrical ventures than
has been made. I think the reason is that the men we have called shrewd
showmen are in reality only shrewd business men and the enterprises
started by their energy and ambition have first languished and then died
because these men in every case failed to learn the rules of the game
they were playing.

To satisfy and hold the interest of any great percentage of the public
is a big job for a catch-penny showman. The reactions of a composite
audience might well be studied by scientific minds. Two Topseys and two
Lawyer Marks’s couldn’t keep the old UNCLE TOM’S CABIN shows alive. The
old minstrel shows died of their own unimaginative elaboration;
three-ring circuses only postponed the evil days for the tent shows
where perhaps something new in one ring might have saved them. You can’t
make a business out of any form of show business that will stand up
beyond the point where the brains are in the business and not in the
show.


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                            ────────────────
                  CHAPTER IX ◆ I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN
                            ────────────────


In June my contract was up and for the moment at least I had had enough
of Hollywood. Some day I am going back, but not until I get some real
assurance of going there as I go into a theater, to practice the trade I
have learned. Owen had returned to New York in May to create a part in a
new play with Richard Bennett. This play, SOLID SOUTH, was running in
Chicago for the spring and summer and was booked to open on Broadway in
September.

Donald had almost finished his first play, in which I took as deep an
interest and delight as his mother would have taken in his first baby,
had his activities led him in that direction. I knew this play had real
promise and would soon call him to New York and that once more we would
be united. And so in June Mrs. Davis and I returned. As I picked up my
tools and started to work I knew that the round peg had slipped
comfortably back into the round hole. The fact that WHOOPEE was still
running in November saved me from a sad fate. For thirty years I have
had at least one play produced in New York each season. I’m going to
have one produced for as many more seasons as I can, more than one if I
can, and as good plays as I can.

It may well be that this thing of producing plays isn’t as wonderful a
thing as I think it is, but it’s my trade. I have served the theater
joyfully for a long time and if a good fairy appeared before me to-day
and offered me the famous “one wish” I am sure that I should say,
“Please, good fairy, I’d like to do it again.”

This doesn’t mean that my life has been all happiness. No man’s has
been. Perhaps it is best that way. We have had our griefs, my wife and
I, our share of sorrow, discouragement and our happiness, but, if I may
for a moment borrow the flamboyant style of my youth, as I look back
over the tapestry of my life, the bright spots do not seem so bright as
I had remembered them, and the dark spots do not seem so dark. The whole
fabric looks rather like one of these old rag carpets of my mother’s
time—woven of bits of crimson and blue, of yellow and black—blending now
in a soft harmony, softened by time.


                                THE END


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 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
    ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
    ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
      when a predominant form was found in this book.
    ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).