I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN

PLAYS BY MR. DAVIS

Icebound

The Detour

The Nervous Wreck

and others

OWEN DAVIS
(Photograph from White Studio)

I’D LIKE

TO DO IT AGAIN

by

OWEN DAVIS

FARRAR & RINEHART, INCORPORATED

ON MURRAY HILL - - - - NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY OWEN DAVIS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS
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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
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I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN

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CHAPTER I ◆ FALSE STARTS
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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.

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.

“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.

GUS HILL
Champion Club Swinger

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

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CHAPTER II ◆ SELLING THE FIRST ONE
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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“The B’s were led by the name of William A. Brady”
(Photo by White Studio)

“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.

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CHAPTER III ◆ THEN AND NOW
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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.”

A. M. Palmer.
“The first man I ever worked with and one of the best.”
(From the Messmore Kendall Collection)

“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.

“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)

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.

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CHAPTER IV ◆ “HOLD, VILLAIN”
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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.

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

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.