XVIII The Man Frohman
G reat as producer, star-maker, and conqueror of two stage-worlds, Charles Frohman was greater as a human being. Like Roosevelt, whom he greatly admired, he was more than a man—he was an institution. His quiet courage, his unaffected simplicity, his rare understanding, his ripe philosophy, his uncanny penetration—above all, his abundant humor—made him a figure of fascinating and incessant interest.
No trait of Charles Frohman was more highly developed than his shyness. He was known as “The Great Unphotographed.” The only time during the last twenty-five years of his life that he sat for a photograph was when he had to get a picture for his passport, and this picture went to a watery grave with him. Behind his prejudice against being photographed was a perfectly definite reason, which he once explained as follows:
“I once knew a theatrical manager whose prospects were very bright. He became a victim of the camera. Fine pictures of him were made and stuck up on the walls everywhere. He used to spend more time looking at these pictures of himself than he did attending to his business. He made a miserable failure. I was quite a young man when I heard of this, but it made a great impression on me. I resolved then never to have my photograph taken if I could help it.”
Once when Frohman and A. L. Erlanger were in London he received the usual request to be photographed by a newspaper camera man. The two magnates looked something alike in that they had a more or less Napoleonic cast of face. Frohman, who always saw a joke in everything, hatched a scheme by which Erlanger was to be photographed for him. The plan worked admirably, and pictures of Erlanger suddenly began to appear all over London labeled “Charles Frohman.”
He could be gracious, however, in his refusal to be photographed. One bright afternoon he was watching the races at Henley when he was approached by R. W. MacFarlane, of New York, who had been on the Frohman staff. MacFarlane asked if he could take a photograph of Frohman and give it to his niece, who was traveling with him.
“No,” said the manager, “but you can take a picture of your niece and I will pose her for it.”
Frohman’s shyness led to what is in many respects the most remarkable of the countless anecdotes about him. It grew out of his illness. In 1913 he had a severe attack of neuritis in London. Although his friends urged him to go and see a doctor, he steadfastly refused. He dreaded physicians just as he dreaded photographers.
One day Barrie came to see him at his rooms at the Savoy. Frohman was in such intense pain that the Scotch author said:
“Frohman, it is absurd for you not to see a doctor. You simply must have medical attention. As a matter of fact, I have already made an engagement for you to see Robson-Roose, the great nerve specialist, at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”
Frohman, who accepted whatever Barrie said, acquiesced. Next day, when half-past three o’clock came, the manager was almost in a state of panic. He said to Dillingham, who was with him:
“Dillingham, you know how I hate to go to see doctors. You also know what is the matter with me. Why don’t you go as my understudy and tell the doctor what is the matter with you? He will give you a nice little prescription or advise you to go to the Riviera or Carlsbad.”
“All right,” said Dillingham, who adored his friend. “I’ll do what you say.”
Promptly at four o’clock Dillingham showed up at the great specialist’s office and said he was Frohman. He underwent a drastic cross-examination. After which he was asked to remove his clothes, was subjected to the most strenuous massage treatment, and, to cap it all, was given an electric bath that reduced him almost to a wreck. He had entered the doctor’s office in the best of health, He emerged from it worn and weary.
When he staggered into Frohman’s rooms two hours later and told his tale of woe, Frohman laughed so heartily over the episode that he was a well man the next day.
Frohman had a great fund of pithy sayings, remarkable for their brevity. With these he indicated his wishes to his associates. His charm of manner, his quick insight into a situation, and his influence over the minds of others were great factors in the accomplishment of his end, often attaining the obviously impossible.
For example, when he would tell his business manager to negotiate a business matter with a man, and it would come to a point where there would be a deadlock, he would say:
“I will see him. Ask him to come down to my hotel.”
The next morning he would walk into the office with a smile on his face, and the first thing he would say perhaps would be:
“I fixed it up all right yesterday; it is going your way.”
“You are a wonder!” his associates would exclaim.
“Oh no! I just talked to him,” was the reply.
Frohman disliked formality. He wanted to go straight to the heart of a thing and have it over with. Somebody once asked him why he did not join the Masonic order. He said:
“I would like to very much if I could just write a check and not bother with all the ceremony.”
Although he never spoke of his great power in the profession, occasionally there was a glimpse of how he felt about it as this incident shows:
Once, when Frohman and Paul Potter were coming back from Atlantic City, Potter picked up a theatrical paper and said:
“Shall I read you the theatrical news?”
“No,” said Frohman. “I make theatrical news.”
In that supreme test of a man’s character—his attitude toward money—he shone. Though his enterprises involved millions, Frohman had an extraordinary disregard of money. He felt its power, but he never idolized it. To him it was a means to an end. He summed up his whole attitude one day when he said:
“My work is to produce plays that succeed, so that I can produce plays that will not succeed. That is why I must have money.
“What I would really like to do is to produce a wonderful something to which I would only go myself. My pleasure would be in seeing a remarkable performance that nobody else could see. But I can’t do that. The next best thing is to produce something for the few critical people. That is what I’m trying for. I have to work through the commercial—it is the white heat through which the artistic in me has to come.” It was his answer to the oft-made charge of “commercialism.”
No one, perhaps, has summed up this money attitude of Frohman’s better than George Bernard Shaw, who said of him:
“There is a prevalent impression that Charles Frohman is a hard-headed American man of business who would not look at anything that is not likely to pay. On the contrary, he is the most wildly romantic and adventurous man of my acquaintance. As Charles XII. became an excellent soldier because of his passion for putting himself in the way of being killed, so Charles Frohman became a famous manager through his passion for putting himself in the way of being ruined.”
In many respects Frohman’s feeling about money was almost childlike. He left all financial details to his subordinates. All he wanted to do was to produce plays and be let alone. Yet he had an infinite respect for the man to whom he had to pay a large sum. He felt that the actor or author who could command it was invested with peculiar significance. Upon himself he spent little. He once said:
“All I want is a good meal, a good cigar, good clothes, a good bed to sleep in, and freedom to produce whatever plays I like.”
He was a magnificent loser. Failure never disturbed him. When he saw that a piece was doomed he indulged in no obituary talk. “Let’s go to the next,” he said, and on he went.
He lost in the same princely way that he spent. The case of “Thermidor” will illustrate. He spent not less than thirty thousand dollars on this production. Yet the moment the curtain went down he realized it was a failure. He stood at one side of the wings and Miss Marbury, who had induced him to put the play on, was at the other. With the fall of the curtain Frohman moved smilingly among his actors with no trace of disappointment on his face. But when he met Miss Marbury on the other side of the stage he said:
“Well, I suppose we have got a magnificent frost. We’ll just write this off and forget it.”
Frohman played with the theater as if it were a huge game. Like life itself, it was a great adventure. In the parlance of Wall Street, he was a “bull,” for he was always raising salaries and royalties. Somebody once said of him:
“What a shame that Frohman works so hard! He never had a day’s fun in his life.”
“You are very much mistaken,” said one of his friends. “His whole life is full of it. He gets his chief fun out of his work.” Indeed, work and humor were in reality the great things with him.
One of the best epigrams ever made about Frohman’s extravagance was this:
“Give Charles Frohman a check-book and he will lose money on any production.”
To say that his word was his bond is to repeat one of the trite tributes to him. But it was nevertheless very true. Often in discussing a business arrangement with his representatives he would say:
“Did I say that?” On being told that he did, he would invariably reply, “Then it must stand at that.”
On one of these occasions he said:
“I have only one thing of value to me, and that is my word. I will keep that until I am broke and then I’ll jump overboard.”
In starting a new venture his method was first to ascertain not how much it would enrich him, but how much it would cost. Thus fortified, he entered into it with enthusiasm, and if he lost he never murmured. Having settled a thing, for good or ill, he would never refer to the negotiations or anything that might have led up to the culmination of that business, either for or against. If his attention was afterward called to it, he would quietly say, “That’s yesterday,” and in this way indicate that he did not wish the matter referred to again.
Frohman’s great desire was to make money for other people. One of his young authors had had a bad failure in London and was very much depressed. Frohman finally worked out a plan to revive his spirits and recoup his finances. He took Alfred Sutro in his confidence and invited the young man to dine. He was like a child, eager to do something good and pleasing. All through the dinner he chaffed the young man, who visibly grew more despondent. Finally he said:
“I have decided to revive a very good play, and I have booked an American tour for it.” Then he told the young man that this play was his first success.
Charles Frohman’s ignorance of money matters was proverbial. One day just as he was about to take the train for Washington a friend stopped him and said:
“I’ve got a great investment for you.”
“No,” said Frohman, “I never invest in anything except theaters.”
“But this is the real thing. The only possible fact that can spoil it is war, and we are widely remote from war.”
In order to get rid of the man Frohman consented to a modest investment. When he got to Washington the first thing that greeted him was the announcement that we were on the verge of war with Mexico.
William Harris once gently remonstrated with Frohman for such lavish expenditure of money.
“It’s simply awful, Charley, the way you spend money,” he said.
Frohman smiled and said:
“It would be awful if I lost a finger or a foot, but spending money on the things that you want to do and enjoy doing is never money wasted.”
At one time he owed a great deal of money to actors and printers, but he always scorned all suggestions that he go through bankruptcy and wipe these claims out. He said he would pay in full some day, and he did, with interest. An actor to whom he owed some four hundred dollars came to him and offered to settle the claim for one hundred dollars. Frohman said he did not believe in taking advantage of a man like that. He advanced the actor one hundred dollars, and eventually paid the other three hundred dollars.
Like every great man, Frohman’s tastes were simple. He always wore clothes of one pattern, and the style seldom varied. He wore no jewelry except a Napoleonic ring on his little finger.
Frohman never married. A friend once asked him why he had chosen to be a bachelor.
“My dear fellow,” he answered, “had I possessed a wife and family I could never have taken the risks which, as a theatrical manager, I am constantly called upon to do.”
He lived, in truth, for and by the theater; it was his world. His heart was in his profession, and no enterprise was too daring, no venture too perilous, to prevent him from boldly facing it if he believed the step was expected of him.
To his intimates Frohman was always known as “C. F.” These were the magic initials that opened or shut the doors to theatrical fame and fortune.
Frohman loved sweet things to eat. Pies were his particular fondness, and he never traveled without a box of candy. As he read plays he munched chocolates. He ate with a sort of Johnsonian avidity. When he went to Europe some of his friends, who knew his tastes well, sent him crates of pies instead of flowers or books.
He shared this fondness for sweets with Clyde Fitch. They did not dare to eat as much pastry as they liked before others, so they often retired to Frohman’s rooms at Sherry’s or to Fitch’s house on Fortieth Street, in New York, and had a dessert orgy.
Frohman almost invariably ate as he worked in his office. When people saw sandwiches piled upon his table, he would say:
“A rehearsal accompanied by a sandwich is progress, but a rehearsal interrupted by a meal is delay.”
Frohman’s letters to his intimates were characteristic. He always wrote them with a blue pencil, and on whatever scrap of paper happened to be at hand. Often it was a sheet of yellow scratch-paper, sometimes the back of an envelope. He wrote as he talked, in quick, epigrammatic sentences. Like Barrie, he wrote one of the most indecipherable of hands. Frequently, instead of a note, he drew a picture to express a sentiment or convey an invitation. One reason for this was that the man saw all life in terms of the theater. It was a series of scenes.
With regard to home life, Frohman had none. He always dwelt in apartments in New York. The only two places where he really relaxed were at Marlow, in England, and at his country place near White Plains in Westchester County, New York. He shared the ownership of this establishment with Dillingham. It entered largely into his plans. Here his few intimates, like Paul Potter, Haddon Chambers, William Gillette, and Augustus Thomas, came and talked over plays and productions. Here, too, he kept vigil on the snowy night when London was to pass judgment on the first production of “Peter Pan” on any stage.
The way he came to acquire an interest in the White Plains house is typical of the man and his methods. Dillingham had bought the place. One day Frohman and Gillette lunched with him there. Frohman was immensely taken with the establishment. He liked the lawn, the garden, the trees, and the aloofness. The three men sat at a round table. Frohman beamed and said:
“This is the place for me. I want to sit at the head of this table.” It was his way of saying that he wanted to acquire an ownership in it, and from that time on he was a co-proprietor.
With characteristic generosity he insisted upon paying two-thirds of the expenses. Then, in his usual lavish fashion, he had it remodeled. He wanted a porch built. Instead of engaging the village carpenter, who could have done it very well, he employed the most famous architects in the country and spent thirty thousand dollars. It was the Frohman way.
Out of the Frohman ownership of the White Plains house came one of the many Frohman jests. Its conduct was so expensive that Frohman one day said to Dillingham, “Let’s rent a theater and make it pay for the maintenance of the house.”
Frohman then leased the Garrick, but instead of making money on it he lost heavily.
The factotum at White Plains was the German Max, whom Dillingham had brought over from the Savoy in London, where he was a waiter. Max became the center of many amusing incidents. One has already been related.
One night Max secured some fine watermelons. As he came through the door with one of them he slipped and dropped it. He repeated this performance with the second melon. Frohman regarded it as a great joke, and roared with laughter. Just then Gillette was announced.
“Now,” said Frohman, quietly, to Dillingham, “we will have Max bring in a watermelon, but I want him to drop it.” In order to insure the success of the trick they stretched a string at the door so that Max would be sure to fall. Then they ordered the melon, and Max appeared, bearing it aloft. He fell, however, before he got to the string, and the joke was saved.
All this jest and joke was part of the game of life as Frohman played it. Whatever the cost, there is no doubt that the charming white-and-green cottage up in the Westchester valley gave him hours of relaxation and ease that were among the pleasantest of his life.
This house at White Plains was indirectly the means through which Dillingham branched out as an independent manager. At this time he was in Frohman’s employ. One day he said to himself:
“This establishment is costing so much that I will have to send out some companies of my own.”
He thereupon got “The Red Mill,” acquired Montgomery and Stone, and thus began a new and brilliant managerial career. No one rejoiced over Dillingham’s success more than Frohman. When Dillingham opened his Globe Theater in New York Frohman addressed a cable to “Charles Dillingham, Globe Theater, U. S. A.”
It is a curious fact about Charles Frohman that though he had millions of dollars at stake, he was never a defendant in litigation. Yet through him foreign authors were enabled to protect their plays from the customary piracy by the memorization of parts. It used to be accepted that if a man went to a play and memorized its speeches he could produce it without paying royalty. N. S. Wood did this with a play called “The World,” that Frohman produced. He took the matter to court as a test case and won.
Charles was not good at remembering people’s names or their addresses. This is why he was much dependent upon his stenographers. His secretary in England, Miss Frances Slater, was so extraordinary in anticipating his words that he always called her “The Wonder.” He used to say:
“Miss Slater, I want to write to the man around the corner,” which turned out to be Arthur Bouclier, the manager of the Garrick Theater, which was not really around the corner; but when the subject of the letter came to be dictated, Miss Slater knew whom he meant. He would never express any surprise on these occasions when the letter handed him to sign contained the right name and address. He seemed to take it as a matter of course.
One day Frohman entered his London office and said to Lestocq:
“You would never guess where I have just come from. I have been to your Westminster Abbey.”
Lestocq expressed surprise, whereupon Frohman continued:
“Yes, I just walked in and spoke to a man in a gown and said, ‘Where is Mr. Irving buried?’ He showed me, and I stood there for a few minutes, said a couple of things, and came on here.”
Frohman’s office at the Empire Theater was characteristic of the man himself. It was a room of considerable proportions, with the atmosphere of a study. It was lined with rather low book-shelves, on which stood the bound copies of the plays he had produced. Interspersed was a complete set of Lincoln’s speeches and letters.
On one side was a large stone fireplace; in a corner stood a grand piano; the center was dominated by a simple, flat-topped desk, across which much of the traffic of the American theater passed.
Near at hand was a low and luxurious couch. Here Frohman sat cross-legged and listened to plays. This performance was a sort of sacred rite, and was always observed behind locked doors. No Frohman employee would think of intruding upon his chief at such a time.
Here, as in London, Frohman was surrounded by pictures of his stars. Dominating them was J. W. Alexander’s fine painting of Miss Adams in “L’Aiglon.” On a shelf stood a bust of John Drew. There were portraits of playwrights, too. A photograph of Clyde Fitch had this inscription:
“To C. F. from c. f.”
There was only one real art object in the office, a magnificent marble bust of Napoleon, whom Frohman greatly admired. He was always pleased when he was told that he looked like the Man of Destiny.
His sense of personal modesty was a very genuine thing. Shortly before he sailed on the fatal trip he had a request from a magazine writer who wanted to write the story of his life. He sent back a vigorous refusal to co-operate, saying, among other things:
“It is most obnoxious to me in every way. It is forcing oneself on the public so far as I am concerned, and I don’t want that, and, besides, they are not interested. It is only for the great men of our country. It is not for me. It looks like cheek and presumption on my part, because it is, and I ask you not to go on with it.”
He believed in system. One day he said:
“We must have on file in our office the complete record of every first-class theater in the United States, together with the name of every dramatic editor and bill-poster.” Out of this grew the famous “Theatrical Guide” compiled by Julius Cahn.
Charles always provided special sleepers for his company when they had to leave early in the morning. He felt that it was an imposition to make the people go to bed late after a play and rise at five or six to get a train. It not only expressed his kindness, but also his good business sense in keeping his people satisfied and efficient.
One of Frohman’s eccentricities was that he never carried a watch. On being asked why he never carried a timepiece, he replied, tersely, “Everybody else carries a watch,” meaning that if he wanted to find out the time of day he could do it more quickly by inquiring of his personal or business associates than by looking for a watch that he may have forgotten to wind up.
“Frohman,” said a friend, “made it a rule in life not to do anything that he could hire somebody else to do, thus leaving himself all the time possible for those things that he alone could do. He probably figured it out that if he carried a watch he would be obliged to spend a certain amount of time each day winding it.
“And on the same principle he refused to worry as to whether he left his umbrella behind or not, by simply not carrying one. If he couldn’t get a cab—a rare occurrence, doubtless, considering the beaten track of his travel—he preferred to walk in the rain.”
Some time before his death Frohman said to a distinguished dramatist who is one of his closest friends:
“Whenever I make a rule I never violate it.”
A visitor to his place at White Plains came away after spending a night there, and declared that the “real Charles Frohman had three dissipations—he smokes all day, he reads plays all night, and—” He stopped.
“What is it?” was the breathless query.
“He plays croquet.”
Frohman had a rare gift for publicity. More than once he turned what seemed to be a complete failure into success. An experience with “Jane” will reveal this side of his versatility.
The bright little comedy hung fire for a while. One reason was that newspaper criticism in New York had been rather unfavorable. Conspicuous among the unfriendly notices was one in the Herald which was headed, “Jane Won’t Go.”
Frohman immediately capitalized this line. He had thousands of dodgers stuck up all over New York. They contained three sentences, which read:
“Jane won’t go.”
Of course not.
She’s come to stay.
From that time on the piece grew in popularity and receipts and became a success.
In summing up the qualities that made Frohman great, one finds, in the last analysis, that he had two in common with J. P. Morgan and the other dynamic leaders of men. One was an incisive, almost uncanny, ability to probe into the hearts of men, strip away the superficial, and find the real substance.
His experience with Clyde Fitch emphasized this to a remarkable degree. Personally no two men could have been more opposite. One was the product of democracy, buoyant and self-made, while the other represented an intellectual, almost effeminate, aristocracy. Yet nearly from the start Frohman perceived the bigness of vision and the profound understanding that lurked behind Fitch’s almost superficial exterior.
In common, too, with Morgan, Roosevelt, and others of the same type, Frohman had an extraordinary quality of unconscious hypnotism. Men who came to him in anger went away in satisfied peace. They succumbed to what was an overwhelming and compelling personality.
He proved this in the handling of his women stars. They combined a group of varied and conflicting temperaments. Each wanted a separate and distinct place in his affections, and each got it. It was part of the genius of the man to make each of his close associates feel that he or she had a definite niche apart. His was the perfecting understanding, and no one better expressed it than Ethel Barrymore, who said, “To try to explain something to Charles Frohman was to insult him.”