XV Plays and Players
O ne day not long before he sailed on the voyage that was to take him to his death, Charles was talking with a celebrated English playwright in his office at the Empire Theater. The conversation suddenly turned to a discussion of life achievement.
“What do you consider the biggest thing that you have done?” asked the visitor.
Frohman rose and pointed with his stick at the rows of book-shelves about him that held the bound copies of the plays he had produced. Then he said with a smile:
“That is what I have done. Don’t you think it is a pretty good life’s work?”
He was not overstepping the mark when he pointed with pride at that army of plays. This list is the greatest monument, perhaps, to his boundless ambition and energy, for it contains the four hundred original productions he made in America, besides the one hundred and twenty-five plays he put on in London. That Charles should have produced so many plays is not surprising. He adored the theater; it was his very being. To him, in truth, all the world was a stage.
Everything that he saw as he walked the streets or rode in a cab or viewed from a railway train he re-visualized and considered in the terms of the playhouse. If he saw an impressive bit of scenery he would say, “Wouldn’t that make a fine background?” If he heard certain murmurs in the country or the tumult of a crowd on the highway, he instinctively said, “How fine it would be to reproduce that sound.”
He only read books with a view of their adaptability to plays. Where other men found diversion and recreation in golfing, motoring, or walking, Charles sought entertainment in reading manuscripts. He was never without a play; when he traveled he carried dozens.
In the matter of plays Frohman had what was little less than a contempt for the avowedly academic. He refused to be drawn into discussions of the so-called “high brow” drama. When some one asked him to name the greatest of English dramatists he replied, quick as a flash:
“The one who writes the last great play.”
“Whom do you consider the greatest American dramatist?” was the question once put to him. His smiling answer was:
“The one whose play the greatest number of good Americans go to see.”
On this same occasion he was asked, “What seat in the theater do you consider the best to view a drama or a musical comedy from?”
“The paid one,” he retorted.
Back in Charles’s mind was a definite and well-ordered policy about plays. His first production on any stage was a melodrama, and, though in later years he ran the whole range from grave to gay, he was always true to his first love. This is one reason why Sardou’s “Diplomacy” was, in many respects, his ideal of a play. It has thrills, suspense, love interests, and emotion. He revived it again and again, and it never failed to give him a certain pleasure.
Once in London Frohman unbosomed himself about play requirements, and this is what he said:
“I start out by asking certain requirements of every piece. If it be a drama, it must have healthfulness and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows in every play I accept.
“Naturally, I am also influenced by the fitness of the chief parts for my chief stars, but I often purchase the manuscript at once on learning its central idea. I commissioned Clyde Fitch and Cosmo Gordon-Lennox to go to work on ‘Her Sister’ after half an hour’s account of the main idea. Ethel Barrymore’s work in that play is the best instance that I can give of the artistic growth of that actress. The particular skill she had obtained—and this is the test of an actress worth remembering—is the art of acting scenes essentially melodramatic in an unmelodramatic manner. After all, what is melodrama? Life itself is melodrama, and life put upon the stage only seems untrue when it is acted melodramatically—that is, unnaturally.”
The foremost quality that Frohman sought in his plays was human interest. His appraisal of a dramatic product was often influenced by his love for a single character or for certain sentimental or emotional speeches. He would almost invariably discuss these plays with his intimates. Often he would act out the whole piece in a vivid and graphic manner and enlarge upon the situations that appealed to his special interest.
Plays thus described by him were found to be extremely entertaining and diverting to his friends, but when presented on the stage to a dispassionate audience they did not always fare so well. A notable example was “The Hyphen.” The big, patriotic speech of the old German-American in the third act made an immense impression on Frohman when he read the play. It led him to produce the piece in record time. He recited it to every caller; he almost lost sight of the rest of the play in his admiration for the central effort. But the audience and the critics only saw this speech as part of a long play.
What Charles lacked in his study of plays in manuscript was the analytical quality. He could feel that certain scenes and speeches would have an emotional appeal, but he could not probe down beneath the surface for the why and the wherefore. For analysis, as for details, he had scant time. He accepted plays mainly for their general effect.
He was very susceptible to any charm that a play held out. If he found the characters sympathetic, attractive, and lovable, that would outweigh any objections made on technical grounds. When once he determined to produce a play, only a miracle could prevent him. The more his associates argued to the contrary, the more dogged he became. He had superb confidence in his judgment; yet he invariably accepted failure with serenity and good spirit. He always assumed the responsibility. He listened sometimes to suggestions, but his views were seldom colored by them.
His association with men like J. M. Barrie, Haddon Chambers, Paul Potter, William Gillette, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Augustus Thomas gave him a loftier insight into the workings of the drama. He was quick to absorb ideas, and he had a strong and retentive memory for details.
Frohman loved to present farce. He enjoyed this type of play himself because it appealed to his immense sense of humor. He delighted in rehearsing the many complications and entanglements which arise in such plays. The enthusiasm with which French audiences greeted their native plays often misled him. He felt that American theater-goers would be equally uproarious. But often they failed him.
The same thing frequently happened with English plays. He would be swept off his feet by a British production; he was at once sure that it would be a success in New York. But New York, more than once, upset this belief. The reason was that Frohman saw these plays as an Englishman. He had the cosmopolitan point of view that the average play-goer in America lacked.
This leads to the interesting subject of “locality” in plays. Frohman once summed up this whole question:
“As I go back and forth, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, the audiences on both sides seem more and more like one. Always, of course, each has his own particular viewpoint, according to the side of the Atlantic I happen to be on. But often they think the same, each from its own angle.
“You bring your English play to America. Nobody is at all disturbed by the mention of Park Lane or Piccadilly Circus. If there is drama in the play, if in itself it interests and holds the audience, nobody pays any attention to its locality or localisms.
“But an English audience sitting before an American play hears mention of West Twenty-third Street or Washington Square, and while it is wondering just where and what these localities are an important incident in the dramatic action slips by unnoticed. Not that English audiences are at all prejudiced against American plays. They take them in the same general way that Americans take English plays. Each public asks, ‘What have you got?’ As soon as it hears that the play is good it is interested.
“English audiences, for example, were quick to discover the fun in ‘The Dictator’ when Mr. Collier acted it in London, though it was full of the local color of New York, both in the central character and in the subject. Somehow the type and the speeches seemed to have a sort of universal humor. I tried it first on Barrie. He marked in the manuscript the places that he could understand. The piece never went better in America.
“On the other hand, one reason why ‘Brewster’s Millions’ did not go well in London was because the severely logical British mind took it all as a business proposition. The problem was sedately figured out on the theory that the young man did not spend the inherited millions.
“If the locality of an American play happens to be a mining village, it is better to change its scenes to a similar village in Australia when you take the play to London. Then the audience is sure to understand. The public of London gave ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ an enthusiastic first night, but it turned out that they had not comprehended the play. It was unthinkable to them that a judge should be disgraced and disbarred by a political ‘ring.’”
The ideal play for Charles Frohman was always the one that he had in mind for a particular star. His special desire, however, was for strong and emotional love as the dominant force in the drama. He felt that all humanity was interested in love, and he believed it established a congenial point of contact between the stage and the audience.
Although he did not especially aspire to Shakespearian production, he used the great bard’s works as models for appraising other plays. “Shakespeare invented farce comedy,” he once said, “and whenever I consider the purchase of such a thing I compare its scenes with the most famous of all farces, ‘The Taming of the Shrew.’ It goes without saying that when it comes to the stage of the production, my aim is to imbue the performance with a spirit akin to that contained in Shakespeare’s humorous masterpiece.”
Frohman often “went wrong” on plays. He merely accepted these mistakes as part of the big human hazard and went on to something new. His amazing series of errors of judgment with plays by Augustus Thomas is one of the traditions of the American theater. The reader already knows how he refused “Arizona” and “The Earl of Pawtucket,” and how they made fortunes for other managers.
One of the most extraordinary of these Thomas mistakes was with “The Witching Hour.” It was about the only time that he permitted his own decision to be swayed by outside influence, and it cost him dearly.
The author read the play to Frohman on a torrid night in midsummer. Frohman, as usual, sat cross-legged on a divan and sipped orangeade incessantly.
Thomas, who has all the art and eloquence of a finished actor, read his work with magnetic effect. When he finished Frohman sat absolutely still for nearly five minutes. It seemed hours to the playwright, who awaited the decision with tense interest. Finally Frohman said in a whisper:
“That is almost too beautiful to bear.”
A pause followed. Then he said, eagerly:
“When shall we do it; whom do you want for star?”
“I’d like to have Gillette,” replied Thomas.
“You can’t have him,” responded Frohman. “He’s engaged for something else.”
With this the session ended. Frohman seemed strangely under the spell of the play. It made him silent and meditative.
The next day he gave the manuscript to some of his close associates to read. They thought it was too psychological for a concrete dramatic success. To their great surprise he agreed with them.
“The Witching Hour” was produced by another manager and it ran a whole season in New York, and then duplicated its success on the road. This experience made Frohman all the more determined to keep his own counsel and follow his instincts with regard to plays thereafter, and he did.
Charles regarded play-producing just as he regarded life—as a huge adventure. An amusing thing happened during the production of “The Other Girl,” a play by Augustus Thomas, in which a pugilist has a prominent rôle.
Lionel Barrymore was playing the part of the prize-fighter, who was generally supposed to be a stage replica of “Kid” McCoy, then in the very height of his fistic powers. In the piece the fighter warns his friends not to bet on a certain fight. The lines, in substance, were:
“You have been pretty loyal to me, but I am giving you a tip not to put any money down on that ’go’ in October.”
One day Frohman found Barrymore pacing nervously up and down in front of his office.
“What’s the matter, Lionel?” he asked.
“Well,” was the reply, “I am very much disturbed about something. I made a promise to ‘Kid’ McCoy, and I don’t know how to keep it. You know I have a line in the play in which the prize-fighter warns his friends not to bet on him in a certain fight in October. The ‘Kid,’ who has been at the play nearly every night since we opened, now has a real fight on for October, and he is afraid it will give people the idea that it is a ‘frame-up.’”
“You mean to say that you want me to change Mr. Thomas’s lines?” asked Frohman, seriously.
“I can’t ask you to do that,” answered Barrymore. “But I promised the ‘Kid’ to speak to you about it, and I have kept my word.”
Frohman thought a moment. Then he said, gravely:
“All right, Lionel, I’ll postpone the date of the fight in the play until November, even December, but not a day later.”
Frohman was not without his sense of imitation. He was quick to follow up a certain type or mood whether it was in the vogue of an actor or the character of a play. This story will illustrate:
One night early in February, 1895, Frohman sat in his wonted corner at Delmonico’s, then on Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street. He had “The Fatal Card,” by Chambers and Stephenson, on the boards at Palmer’s Theater; he also had A. M. Palmer’s Stock Company on the road in Sydney Grundy’s play “The New Woman.” This naturally gave him a lively interest in Mr. Palmer’s productions.
Paul Potter, who was then house dramatist at Palmer’s, bustled into the restaurant with the plot of a new novel which had been brought to his attention by the news-stand boy at the Waldorf. Frohman listened to his recital with interest.
“What is the name of the book?” he asked.
“Trilby,” replied Potter.
“Well,” he continued, “it ought to be called after that conjurer chap, Bengali, or whatever his name is. However, go ahead. Get Lackaye back from ‘The District Attorney’ company to which Palmer has lent him. Engage young Ditrichstein by all means for one of your Bohemians. Call in Virginia Harned and the rest of the stock company. And there you are.”
With uncanny precision he had cast the leading rôles perfectly and on the impulse of the moment.
During the fortnight of the incubation of the play Potter saw Frohman nightly, for they were now fast friends. Frohman was curiously fascinated by “Bengali,” as he insisted upon calling Svengali.
“We do it next Monday in Boston,” said Potter, “and I count on your coming to see it.”
Frohman went to Boston to see the second performance. After the play he and Potter walked silently across the Common to the Thorndyke Hotel. In his room Frohman broke into speech:
“They are roasting it awfully in New York,” he began. “Yet Joe Jefferson says it will go around the world.” Then he added, “They say you have cut out all the Bohemian stuff.”
“Nevertheless,” replied Potter, “W. A. Brady has gone to New York to-night to offer Mr. Palmer ten thousand dollars on account for the road rights.”
“Well,” said Frohman, showing his hand at last, “Jefferson and Brady are right, and if Palmer will let me in I’ll go half and half, or, if he prefers, I’ll take it all.”
At supper after the first performance at the Garden Theater in New York, Frohman advised Sir Herbert Tree to capture the play for London. Henceforth, wherever he traveled, “Trilby” seemed to pursue him.
“I’ve seen your old ‘Bengali,’” he wrote Potter, “in Rome, Vienna, Berlin, everywhere. It haunts me. And, as you cut out the good Bohemian stuff, I’ll use it myself at the Empire.”
He did so in Clyde Fitch’s version of “La Vie de Bohème,” which was called “Bohemia.”
“How did it go?” Potter wrote him from Switzerland.
“Pretty well,” replied Frohman. “Unfortunately we left out ‘Bengali.’”
On more than one occasion Frohman produced a play for the mere pleasure of doing it. He put on a certain little dramatic fantasy. It was foredoomed to failure and held the boards only a week.
“Why did you do this play?” asked William H. Crane.
“Because I wanted to see it played,” answered Frohman. “I knew it would not be successful, but I simply had to do it. I saw every performance and I liked it better every time I saw it.”
Often Frohman would make a contract with a playwright for a play, and long before the first night he would realize that it had no chance. Yet he kept his word with the author, and it was always produced.
The case of “The Heart of a Thief,” by the late Paul Armstrong, is typical. Frohman paid him an advance of fifteen hundred dollars. After a week of rehearsals every one connected with the play except Armstrong realized that it was impossible.
Frohman, however, gave it an out-of-town opening and brought it to the Hudson Theater in New York, where it ran for one week. When he decided to close it he called the company together and said:
“You’ve done the best you could. It’s all my fault. I thought it was a good play. I was mistaken.”
Frohman took vast pride in the “clean quality” of his plays, as he often phrased it. His whole theatrical career was a rebuke to the salacious. He originally owned Edward Sheldon’s dramatization of Suderman’s “The Song of Songs.” On its production in Philadelphia it was assailed by the press as immoral. Frohman immediately sold it to A. H. Woods, who presented it with enormous financial success in New York.
He was scrupulous to the last degree in his business relations with playwrights. Once a well-known English author, who was in great financial need, cabled to his agent in America that he would sell outright for two thousand dollars all the dramatic rights to a certain play of his that Frohman and an associate had on the road at that time. The associate thought it was a fine opportunity and personally cabled the money through the agent. Then he went to Frohman and said, with great satisfaction:
“I’ve made some money for us to-day.”
“How’s that?” asked Frohman.
Then his associate told the story of the author’s predicament and what he had done. He stood waiting for commendation. Instead, Frohman’s face darkened; he rang a bell, and when his secretary appeared he said:
“Please wire Blank [mentioning the playwright’s name] that the money cabled him to-day was an advance on future royalties.”
Then he turned to his associate and said:
“Never, so long as you work with me or are associated with me in any enterprise, take advantage of the distress of author or actor. This man’s play was good enough for us to produce; it is still good enough to earn money. When it makes money for us it also makes money for him.”
By the force of his magnetic personality Charles amiably coerced more than one unwilling playwright into submission to his will. An experience with Margaret Mayo will illustrate.
Miss Mayo returned on the same steamer with him when he made his last trip from London to the United States. As they walked up the gang-plank at Liverpool the manager told the author that he had a play he wished her to adapt.
“But I have decided to adapt no more plays,” said Miss Mayo.
“Never mind,” replied Frohman. “We will see about that.”
Needless to say, by the time the ship reached New York the play was in Miss Mayo’s trunk and the genial tyrant had exacted a promise for the adaptation.
Miss Mayo immediately went to her country house up the Hudson. For a week she reproached herself for having fallen a victim to the Frohman beguilements. In this state of mind she could do no work on the manuscript.
With his astonishing intuition Frohman divined that the author was making no progress, so he sent her a note asking her to come to town, and adding, “I have something to show you.”
Miss Mayo entered the office at the Empire determined to throw herself upon the managerial mercy and beg to be excused from the commission. But before she could say a word Frohman said, cheerily:
“I’ve found the right title for our play.”
Then he rang a bell, and a boy appeared holding a tightly rolled poster in his hand. At a signal he unfolded it, and the astonished playwright beheld these words in large red and white letters:
Charles Frohman
Presents
I DIDN’T WANT TO DO IT
A Farce in Three Acts
By Margaret Mayo
Of course the usual thing happened. No one could resist such an attack. Miss Mayo went back to the country without protest and she finished the play. It was destined, however, to be produced by some other hand than Frohman’s.
Frohman always sought seclusion when he wanted to work out the plans for a production. He sometimes went to extreme lengths to achieve aloofness. An incident related by Goodwin will illustrate this.
During the run of “Nathan Hale” in New York Goodwin entered his dressing-room one night, turned on the electric light, and was amazed to see Charles sitting huddled up in a corner.
“What are you doing here, Charley?” asked Goodwin.
“I am casting a new play, and came here to get some inspiration. Good night,” was the reply. With that he walked out.
There was one great secret in Charles Frohman’s life. It is natural that it should center about the writing of a play; it is natural, too, that this most intimate of incidents in the career of the great manager should be told by his devoted friend and colleague of many years, Paul Potter.
Here it is as set down by Mr. Potter:
We had hired a rickety cab at the Place Saint-François in Lausanne, and had driven along the lake of Geneva to Morges, where, sitting on the terrace of the Hôtel du Mont Blanc, we were watching the shore of Savoy across the lake, and the gray old villages of Thonon and Evian, and the mountains, rising ridge upon ridge, behind them. And Frohman, being in lyric mood, fell to quoting “The Blue Hills Far Away,” for Owen Meredith’s song was one of the few bits of verse that clung in his memory.
“Odd,” said he, relapsing into prose, “that a chap should climb hill after hill, thinking he had reached his goal, and should forever find the blue hills farther and farther away.”
While he was ruminating the clouds lifted, and there, in a gap of the hills, was the crest of Mont Blanc, with its image of Napoleon lying asleep in the snow.
I have seen Frohman in most of the critical moments of his life, but I never saw him utterly awe-stricken till then.
“Gee,” said he, at length, “what a mountain to climb!”
“It is sixty miles away,” I ventured to suggest.
“Well,” he remarked, “I’ll climb it some day. As John Russell plastered the Rocky Mountains with ‘The City Directory,’ so I’ll hang a shingle from the top of Mont Blanc: ‘Ambition: a comedy in four acts by Charles Frohman.’” And as we went home to Ouchy he told me the secret desire of his heart.
He wanted to write a play.
“Isn’t it enough to be a theatrical manager?” I asked.
“No,” said he, “a theatrical manager is a joke. The public thinks he spends his days in writing checks and his nights in counting the receipts. Why, when I wanted to become a depositor at the Union Bank in London, the cashier asked me my profession. ‘Theatrical manager,’ I replied. ‘Humph!’ said the cashier, taken aback. ‘Well, never mind, Mr. Frohman; we’ll put you down as ’a gentleman.’”
“But is a playwright,” I asked, “more highly reputed than a theatrical manager?”
“Not in America,” said Frohman. “Most Americans think that the actors and actresses write their own parts. I was on the Long Branch boat the other day and met a well-known Empire first-nighter. ‘What are you going to give us next season, Frohman?’ he said.
“‘I open with a little thing by Sardou,’ I replied.
“‘Sardou!’ he cried. ‘Who in thunder is Sardou?’
“All the same,” Frohman continued, “I mean to be a playwright. Didn’t Lester Wallack write ‘Rosedale’ and ‘The Veteran’? Didn’t Augustin Daly make splendid adaptations of German farces? Doesn’t Belasco turn out first-class dramas? Then why not I? I mean to learn the game. Don’t give me away, but watch my progress in play-making as we jog along through life.”
He got his first tip from Pinero. “When I have sketched out a play,” observed the author of “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” “I go and live among the characters.”
Frohman had no characters of his own, but he held in his brain a fabulous store of other people’s plays. And whenever they had a historical or a literary origin he ran these origins to their lair. At Ferney, on the Lake of Geneva, he cared nothing about Voltaire; he wanted to see the place where the free-thinkers gathered in A. M. Palmer’s production of “Daniel Rochat.” At Geneva he was not concerned with Calvin, but with memories of a Union Square melodrama, “The Geneva Cross.” At Lyons he expected the ghosts of Claude Melnotte and Pauline to meet him at the station. In Paris he allowed Napoleon to slumber unnoticed in the Invalides while he hunted the Faubourg Saint-Antoine for traces of “The Tale of Two Cities,” and the Place de la Concorde for the site of the guillotine on which Sidney Carton died, and the Latin Quarter haunts of Mimi and Musette, and the Bal Bullier where Trilby danced, and the Concert des Ambassadeurs where Zaza bade her lover good-by.
Any production was an excuse for these expeditions. Sir Herbert Tree had staged “Colonel Newcome”; we had ourselves plotted a dramatization of “Pendennis”; Mrs. Fiske had given “Vanity Fair”; so off we went, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, searching for the place, duly placarded, where Thackeray lunched in the days of the “Paris Sketch-book” and the “Ballad of Bouillabaisse.”
In the towns of Kent we got on the trail of Dickens with the enthusiasm of a Hopkinson Smith; in London, between Drury Lane and Wardour Street, we hunted for the Old Curiosity Shop; in Yarmouth we discovered the place where Peggotty’s boat-hut might have lain on the sands. With William Seymour, who knew every street from his study of “The Rivals,” we listened to the abbey bells of Bath. And when “Romeo and Juliet” was to be revived with Sothern and Marlowe, Frohman even proposed that we should visit Verona. He only abandoned the idea on discovering that the Veronese had no long-distance telephones, and that, while wandering among the tombs of the Montagus and Capulets, he would be cut off from his London office.
Having thus steeped himself in the atmosphere of his work, he set forth to learn the rules of the game. I met him in Paris on his return from New York. “How go the rules?” I asked.
“Rotten,” said he. “Our American playwrights say there are no rules; with them it is all inspiration. The Englishmen say that rules exist, but what the rules are they either don’t know or won’t tell.”
We went to the Concert Rouge. Those were the happy days when there were no frills; when the price of admission was charged with what you drank; when Saint-Saëns accompanied his “Samson and Delilah” with an imaginary flute obligato on a walking-stick; when Massenet, with his librettist, Henri Cain, dozed quietly through the meditation of “Thaïs”; when the students and their girls forgot frivolity under the spell of “L’Arlesienne.”
In a smoky corner sat a group of well-known French playwrights, headed by G. A. Caillavet, afterward famous as author of “Le Roi.” They were indulging in a heated but whispered discussion. They welcomed Frohman cordially, then returned to the debate.
“What are they talking about?” asked Frohman.
“The rules of the drama,” said I.
“Then there are rules!” cried the manager, eagerly.
“Ask Caillavet,” said I.
“Rules?” exclaimed Caillavet, who spoke English. “Are there rules of painting, sculpture, music? Why, the drama is a mass of rules! It is nothing but rules.”
“And how long,” faltered Frohman, thinking of his play—“how long would it take to learn them?”
“A lifetime at the very least,” answered Caillavet. Disconsolate, Frohman led me out into the Rue de Tournon. Heartbroken, he convoyed me into Foyot’s, and drowned his sorrows in a grenadine.
From that hour he was a changed man. He apparently put aside all thought of the drama whose name was to be stenciled on the summit of Mont Blanc; yet, nevertheless, he applied himself assiduously to learning the principles on which the theater was based.
Another winter had passed before we sat side by side on the terrace of the Café Napolitain.
“I have asked Harry Pettitt, the London melodramatist,” Frohman said, “to write me a play. ‘I warn you, Frohman,’ he replied, ‘that I have only one theme—the Persecuted Woman.’ Dion Boucicault, who was present, said, ‘Add the Persecuted Girl.’ Joseph Jefferson was with us, and Jefferson remarked, ‘Add the Persecuted Man.’ So was Henry Irving, who said: ‘Pity is the trump card; but be Aristotelian, my boy; throw in a little Terror; with Pity I can generally go through a season, as with ‘Charles the First’ or ‘Olivia’; with Terror and Pity combined I am liable to have something that will outlast my life.” And Irving mentioned “The Bells” and “The Lyons Mail.”
“But who will write you your Terror and Pity?” I asked Frohman.
“If Terror means ‘thrill,’” said Frohman, “I can count on Belasco and Gillette. If Pity means ‘sympathy,’ the Englishmen do it pretty well. So does Fitch. So do the French, who used to be masters of the game.”
“You don’t expect,” I said, “to pick up another ‘Two Orphans,’ a second ‘Ticket of Leave Man’?”
“I’m not such a fool,” said Frohman. “But I’ve got hold of something now that will help me to feed my stock company in New York.” And off we went with Dillingham to see “The Girl from Maxim’s” at the Nouveautés.
When we got home to the Ritz Frohman discussed the play after his manner: “Do you know,” he said, “I find the element of pity quite as strongly developed in these French farces as in the Ambigu melodramas. The truant husband leaves home, goes out for a good time, gets buffeted and bastinadoed for his pains, and when the compassionate audience says, ‘He has had enough; let up,’ he comes humbly home to the bosom of his family and is forgiven. Where can you find a more human theme than that?”
“Then you hold,” said I, “that even in a French farce the events should be reasonable?”
“I wouldn’t buy one,” he replied, “if I didn’t consider its basis thoroughly human. Dion Boucicault told me long ago that farce, like tragedy, must be founded on granite. ‘Farce, well done,’ said he, ‘is the most difficult form of dramatic composition. That is why, if successful, it is far the most remunerative.’”
Years went by. The stock company was dead. “Charles Frohman’s Comedians” had disappeared. The “stars” had supplanted them. Frohman was at the zenith of his career. American papers called him “the Napoleon of the Drama.” Prime Ministers courted him in the grill-room of the London Savoy. The Paris Figaro announced the coming of “the celebrated impresario.” I heard him call my name in the crowd at the Gare du Nord and we bundled into a cab.
“So you’re a great man now,” I said.
“Am I?” he remarked. “There’s one thing you can bet on. If they put me on a throne to-day they are liable to yank me off to-morrow.”
“And how’s your own play getting along?”
“Don’t!” he winced. “Let us go to the Snail.”
In the cozy recesses of the Escargot d’Or, near the Central Markets, he unraveled the mysteries of the “star system” which had made him famous.
“It’s the opposite of all we ever believed,” he said, while the mussels and shell-fish were being heaped up before him. “Good-by to Caillavet and his rules. Good-by, Terror and Pity. Good-by, dear French farce. Give me a pretty girl with a smile, an actor with charm, and I will defy our old friend Aristotle.”
“Is it as easy as that?” I asked, in amazement.
“No,” said he, “it’s confoundedly difficult to find the girl with the smile and the actor with charm. It is pure accident. There are players of international reputation who can’t draw a dollar. There are chits of chorus-girls who can play a night of sixteen hundred dollars in Youngstown, Ohio.”
“And the play doesn’t matter?” I inquired.
“There you’ve got me,” said Frohman, as the crêpes Suzette arrived in their chafing-dish. “My interest makes me pretend that the play’s the thing. I congratulate foreign authors on a week of fourteen thousand dollars in Chicago, and they go away delighted. But I know, all the time, that of this sum the star drew thirteen thousand nine hundred dollars, and the author the rest.”
“To what do you attribute such a state of affairs?”
“Feminine curiosity. God bless the women.”
“Are there no men in your audiences?” I asked.
“Only those whom the women take,” said Frohman. “The others go to musical shows. Have some more crêpes Suzette.”
“But what do the critics say?” I persisted.
“My dear Paul,” said Frohman, solemnly, “they call me a ‘commercial manager’ because I won’t play Ibsen or Maeterlinck. They didn’t help me when I tried for higher game. I had years of poverty, years of privation. To-day I take advantage of a general feminine desire to view Miss Tottie Coughdrop; and, to the critics, I’m a mere Bulgarian, a ‘commercial manager.’ So was Lester Wallack when he admitted ‘The World’ to his classic theater. So was Augustin Daly when he banished Shakespeare in favor of ‘The Great Ruby.’ If the critics want to reform the stage, let them begin by reforming the public.”
In his cabin on the Lusitania he showed me a mass of yellow manuscript, scribbled over with hieroglyphics in blue pencil.
“That’s my play,” he said, very simply.
“Shall I take it home and read it?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “I will try it on Barrie and bring it back in better shape.”
So he shook hands and sailed with his cherished drama, which reposes to-day, not on the summit of Mont Blanc, but at the bottom of the Irish Sea.