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.

[Illustration:

ELIZABETH DREYER

“And a few months later and with much more difficulty persuaded her to

become a member of the Davis family.”

]

[Illustration:

LAURETTE TAYLOR

“One of the best soubrettes I ever saw.”

(_Photograph by Ira L. Hill. From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)

]

Then one day—and let me call the attention of the rulers of the motion

picture business to this—Mr. Woods and I were struck by a great notion.

“We will,” we said, “increase this average business of $3,500 by putting

out a show so much bigger than any of the others that we can safely

count on over-capacity business to pay our increased expense and yield

us a greater than average profit.”

No sooner said than done. NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL took to the

road and played for a year to an average of four thousand dollars a

week. What could be more natural than to continue the good work? The

next season we put out three more “big shows” and allowed them to cost

us about thirty percent more than our old average of expense. By this

time our rivals, attracted by the reports of our big business with our

“Super-Specials” began to compete for this added revenue and produced a

flock of “Super-Specials” which in a season, since all things are

comparative, educated the public to expect “big shows.” Thus, the

average show now costs a sum of money that could only be drawn by an

extraordinary show, and in three years the popular-priced theater

business was dead.

Naturally, the advance of the pictures had something to do with our

defeat, but neither then nor now can the decline of the theater be

fairly laid to the fact that the public prefers the motion picture to

the drama. All of the ills of the theater in my time are due directly to

the folly, the ignorance and the greed of the theatrical manager. I have

many life-long friends among these men; among them are men of fine

principle and honest intentions, but the composite manager has always

been the stumbling block in the way of our progress. We tried to fight

the advancing wave of motion pictures with dirty, ill-lighted theaters,

bad-mannered attendants and arrogant box-office men, and we lost, as we

deserved to lose.

There is a popular idea that the theatrical manager failed at his job

because he allowed his artistic soul to overwhelm his natural business

instincts. In my humble opinion he failed because he usually had no

artistic soul at all and no business instincts. I know of about five

managers of the last decade who were what I would call business men, and

I am prepared to offer a silver cup for the names of any others.

The arrogance of the old-time manager, to whom actors and authors were

slaves and chattels, has gone, and although I was one of those who

fought for their passing I have not as yet become reconciled to their

substitutes. The best men of to-day are still the men who were the best

of the old order and if some of their old power is gone I can’t help

feeling that with it went much of the old glamour and romance of the

theater.

This writing rubber stamp stories by formula was the main cause of the

collapse of the Stair and Havlyn Circuit and is the only real reason for

to-day’s depression in the New York theater. There is always an audience

for a good play, but unfortunately there isn’t always a good play for an

audience. Just as every good play produced stimulates theatergoing, so

does every bad play produced discourage it, and when the bad plays

outnumber the good by too great a proportion the public naturally

becomes very cautious. We figure of late in the theater that only one

play out of seven produced is even moderately successful, which when you

come to think of it isn’t so much the public’s lack of interest as it is

the playwright’s lack of skill.

When a man has spent time and money to see six terrible plays one after

the other it isn’t surprising that his eagerness is somewhat cooled. If

it were possible to bring into New York this season fifteen fine plays

we should hear no more talk about hard times in the theater.

Unfortunately it isn’t possible.

Under the present conditions the demand for good plays has little effect

upon the supply partly because good plays are hard to write and even

more because we are not in agreement as to what constitutes a good play.

The novelist often succeeds upon his literary style, a painter by his

drawing and his sense of color, but paradoxically enough a good play is

a bad play unless the writer has been fortunate in the choice of his

subject matter; skill alone won’t save him. Since the only real standard

by which one may judge a play is the rather primitive one of whether one

likes it or not, it is easy to see how dangerous a game this play

writing is. A good workman may work his heart out for many months to be

condemned at last by the same feeling that gave birth to the old

doggerel “I do not like you, Doctor Fell.”

Few critics are clever enough to make the distinction between a writer’s

skill and his good or evil fortune in the choice of his subject, and I

am often amused to read the praises of the genius of an author who has

been lucky enough to hit upon a theme or story that has tickled the

public’s fancy and the complete damnation of the poor wretch who has

failed to do so, although in every other particular the later play may

be ten times as well built and well written as the former. Naturally we

like to be amused and resent being bored. Yet, as a matter of truth, the

same skill, the same hard work and the same knowledge of life and of

play structure goes into a man’s failures as he puts into his successes.

The writer who knows his trade fails or triumphs the hour he makes his

decision of what he is going to write about. Then, too, the subject

matter of plays is still far too often dictated by the manager and

between us we are still getting ourselves into trouble trying to guess

what the public wants instead of trying to do the best work we know how

to do and letting it go at that. The old notion that the experienced

showman knows more about plays than our present public knows dies hard

and many of our plays are still being written by and for an intelligence

distinctly below the average intelligence of the audience.

The day of the routine comedy-drama and melodrama is over. The

successful play of to-day is nine times out of ten a good play. In fact

the most encouraging thing about the theater to-day is not that good

plays are sure of success but that bad plays are sure of failure. An

optimist may look happily forward to the time when writers and managers

who remain blind to the change in public taste and persist in producing

routine sugar-coated piffle will all have starved to death or been

driven out of the business.

This change has come about very gradually, as immigration has been

restricted and the living standards of the American people have

advanced. Life to-day is stimulating where once it was, at least for the

majority, dull and uneventful. Romance, once supplied almost wholly by

the theater, is all about us. Modern thought, modern invention, have

done much to end the bland acceptance of routine fiction, both on the

stage and on the printed page, and to be sure of an audience to-day one

must have something to say and know how to say it.

Of course, I am writing now of twenty years ago but even then the change

was coming and in a way I was alive to it. I am, at this point, quite

willing to admit that I frequently turn out work far beneath the

standard that my observation tells me is necessary for success, and that

to-morrow I am quite as apt to start frantically at work on an untrue

and obsolete theme as any novice. There are writers who are under the

control of their own critical faculty, but unfortunately for me I have

never been one of them. A story pops into my head. Often I know it has

no importance at all and sternly shut it out. But, as is often the case,

if the story keeps coming back of its own free will I usually end by

forgiving it its obvious faults and gradually working myself up into a

lather of paternal pride.... Who ever saw a young mother whose baby

didn’t seem remarkable to her? These yarns of mine seem good to me

because they are mine. If any one else was to ask my opinion of the same

story I would say it was terrible, but by the time I have lived with it

for a month or so I see beauty in it, because I am looking at it hoping

to see that beauty.

As a matter of fact, one of the greatest differences between a good play

and a bad one is that a good play says what the writer thinks it says,

while a bad one doesn’t. Play writing is really an extraordinary

difficult art; if all that was necessary for an emotion to reach an

audience was for the writer to feel that emotion, we would have few

failures. It is quite possible for a writer to be honestly affected by

the sorrows of a character without the audience in the least sharing his

feeling. I have often wept as I wrote a scene that never in the least

affected any one besides myself. I have chuckled over many a farce

situation that never got a laugh. A playwright’s words and his

situations must have that strange power that will project them over the

footlights. This projecting force is made up of instinct, experience,

sincerity and a queer sense of rhythm, the timing of the dramatist.

When I am asked how much play writing may be taught I always hesitate. A

lot may be taught—to the right person—very little to the one without the

instinctive ear—the sense of pace and build that must be there, although

just exactly what it is and where it comes from I find it difficult to

explain.

I dug up recently, out of my files, one of the first plays I ever wrote,

and was amazed at its crudity, but even more amazed by the lilt of it;

its pace, its timing and its gradual accumulation to its crescendo were

as deft and as sure as anything I could write to-day ... and at the time

I wrote it these things were entirely instinctive. One may learn a lot

about what not to write, may learn much of literary style and taste and

many of the tricks of construction, but I doubt if any one without the

instinctive feel of the born dramatist can learn how to time a speech or

pitch a climax and without this all the rest is useless.

Many of the greatest novelists, both of the past and the present, have

failed utterly when they tried to write for the theater. Often they were

far better writers than any dramatist I know. They knew as much about

moods and character as any of us—but their words won’t play, no one can

act their scenes.

Few persons realize how vital this instinctive timing is to a play.

Bartley Campbell, a dramatist of the old school, was a master of it. His

old drama, THE WHITE SLAVE, was quite as lyric as any song. The late

Charles Kline could time a climax so deftly that, although “the big

scene” of THE LION AND THE MOUSE hardly makes sense when you read the

words, it was impossible not to be thrilled by them when you heard them

spoken.

The writer of the old school was more dependent upon this instinctive

timing than the writer of to-day, but even now the man or woman who

writes for the theater must write “good theater” no matter how sound may

be his philosophy. Instinct and emotion will, I think, always be more

vital to success than literary style or even good sense and logic.

To-day a writer must avoid the conventions just as yesterday he had to

abide by them, and in this difference lies the distinction between the

old school and the new. In the days of which I am writing, the

characters of our popular-priced plays were as sturdily founded upon a

conventional mold as the most dogmatic creed of the most narrow-minded

religious fanatics of the day, and any stepping aside upon a more

flowery path was sternly frowned upon. The good play maker of the

popular-priced theater was supposed to know what a proper list of

characters for a play must be and any departure from that accepted list

was taken as a sign of the bad workman.

In my day the list ran as follows:

1. HERO.

The hero was either poor or else very young and very drunk. If sober and

wealthy he automatically became a villain. Wild young men with wealthy

fathers might do in a pinch—they could be reformed by the heroine in the

third act, and in this lady’s company, in the last act, they could

receive the father’s blessing and the keys to the cellar, or whatever

best represented the family fortune. I was, however, never very strong

for the rich young man type of hero, well knowing how much closer to the

hearts of the audience the honest working man type was sure to be. Brave

this hero must always be, and strong and kind, but it was unfortunately

difficult for him to be wise, as the burden of troubles it was necessary

to load upon this poor man’s shoulders, by way of dramatic suspense,

would never have been carried by any one but a terrible sap.

2. HEROINE.

If the hero was extremely poor, it was possible for her to be extremely

wealthy, but by far the safest bet was to make her the daughter of an

honest working man. In these days the young girls who went to the

popular-priced theaters were not themselves employed to any extent as

clerks or stenographers, and they knew more about factory life and the

experience of the day laborer and less about the white collar workers

than they know to-day. Our heroine must be pure at any cost, or else she

must die. There could be no temporizing with the “the wages of sin are

death” slogan. In all my experience I never once saw it successfully

defied. The heroine must, of course, always marry the hero. Our

audiences would not stand for any but a happy ending with love and

wealth bestowed upon the girl. This was bad art, but it always seemed to

me to be pretty good sense, as the theater to them meant not life as it

was but life as they wanted it to be, and the young girl in our

audiences who thrilled for an hour over the wealth and luxury and the

ideal love that always came to the fictitious character she had for a

time exchanged places with had little chance of remaining in this

fairyland for long.

3. THE HEAVY MAN.

Always wealthy; the silk hat was his badge of office. In a good

melodrama he never reformed, he bit the dust. He was the most absurd

thing connected with these old plays. The necessity for his evil

plotting was so great that even the most innocent of audiences must have

frequently wondered why he was not poisoned at an early age by his own

unfortunate disposition. As a matter of fact, one of the principal

causes of the death of this form of entertainment was the “Desperate

Desmond” cartoons that instructed our public in the absurdity of this

stock character.

4. THE HEAVY WOMAN.

There were two of her, the haughty lady of wealth and social position,

quite naturally the instinctive enemy of our audiences, and the “bad

woman” who in these days was spoken of in a hushed whisper. I recall

some successful heavy women who had dark hair, but these were always

cast in the society women parts. The real bad ones had to be blondes and

they averaged a good hundred and sixty pounds.

5. THE SOUBRETTE.

A working girl with bad manners and a good heart. Laurette Taylor was

one of the best of these I ever saw. This type of part, the real

soubrette, has disappeared from our theater, and yet some of the best

actresses I have ever known were soubrettes,—Maggie Mitchell, Minnie

Palmer, Mrs. Fiske (when she was Minnie Maddern) and a host of others.

6. THE COMEDIAN.

Either Jew, Irish or German, the most important member of the company in

the old days and the one who drew the largest salary. We might and, as a

matter of fact, we frequently did get away with a terrible leading man,

but the comedian had to be good.

7. THE LIGHT COMEDY BOY.

This character was always a humble and faithful friend of the lovers and

was always in love with the soubrette. I recall once trying to have this

character in love with some one else—but I had to rewrite the play. The

audience got too bewildered.

8. THE SECOND HEAVY.

He was just a bum, a tool of the villain’s, and as it was usual to kill

him along toward the middle of the second act, we never found it

necessary to engage a very good actor.

* * * * *

These eight made up the cast and to them we added two or three utility

actors to play such “walking parts” as the plot demanded, but no matter

what the play these eight characters were always in it. If they hadn’t

been I am sure the audience would have demanded their money back.

Scenically, these plays of ours were very elaborate. They were always in

four acts and frequently with as many as five scenes in each act.

CHINATOWN CHARLIE had twenty-two scenes. The mechanical dexterity

demanded in writing a play of this kind was very important and an

extremely difficult trick to acquire. Front scenes in the old melodramas

were always flat and stupid, just as they are in the musical comedies of

to-day. The expert workman let his front scenes run the exact time it

took the stage carpenters to set the next scene back of it and not a

moment longer, which took experience and care. It was also necessary to

climax these scenes and these scene climaxes were the forerunners of the

modern “blackout”—some sure-fire “belly-laugh” or bit of heroic bunk

that would be sure to bring a yell of delight from the audience to cover

the moment in the dark necessary to fly the drop and start the next

scene.

After a time I got to be so expert in this that I could give a cue to

the audience for a laugh or a yell of approval that would last just long

enough to fill in the desired pause. To me the most interesting thing

about these old manuscripts of mine are these “audience cues” that would

be meaningless to any one who should chance to read them but were a very

real and very necessary part of the play.

Just how I could have been quite serious in building these old plays I

can’t at this moment quite comprehend, but the fact is that I was, just

as every man who is successful in his work must be. Even the priceless

line of Nellie, the well-known cloak model, was quite gravely written.

Nellie was endeavoring to escape from the attentions of a very evil

gentleman who from the start of the play showed signs of paying her

attentions that were far from honorable. In the first act he pushed her

under a descending elevator in the basement of a department store. In

Act II he threw her off Brooklyn Bridge and in the third he bound her to

the tracks of the elevated railroad just as a train came thundering

along. In the fourth act he climbs in her bedroom window at an early

hour of the morning and when both modesty and prudence force her to

shrink away from him he looked at her reproachfully and said: “Why do

you fear me, Nellie?”

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

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CHAPTER V ◆ UP FROM MELODRAMA

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About 1911 I saw the fate of the popular-priced game, and got out of it

before the final crash, as did Sam Harris, Al Woods and a few of the

others. I started to look about for a new way of earning my living. I

had made money at the game and was in no danger from that source, but I

was then, in 1910, only thirty-seven years old and had trained myself to

the habit of almost constant work, a habit I have never as yet been able

to break.

My name, as the author of literally hundreds of bloodthirsty melodramas,

was a thing of scorn to the highbrows of the theater, used as a horrible

example to young authors and to frighten bad children. The very thought

of my being allowed to produce a play in a Broadway theater was quite

absurd, as my friends all assured me. I kept on writing, however, for

the same reason that keeps me at it now, because I love to write plays,

no matter whom it hurts. For a year or two I had a tough time, but I

managed to find a market among the road stars and the one night stand

companies, and I wrote a few comedies and dramatized several novels.

They were successful enough in the towns where they were played but were

never heard of in New York. At this time, also, I developed a trick of

writing plays directly for stock companies and by good salesmanship

built up quite an income from this by-product. I was absolutely bound to

break into the New York game and in spite of many rebuffs I kept

knocking at the doors of the New York managers.

The doors of New York managers, however, were closely guarded, even in

the comparatively far-off days of which I am writing, and in the season

of 1910 the best I could manage to do, aside from my usual flock of road

shows and my growing list of plays popular with the stock companies at

that time successfully scattered all over the country, was to secure a

couple of matinée performances. As a matter of fact, a matinée

performance of the play of a new author is simply a public announcement

by the manager of his lack of faith and neither of these efforts of mine

came to much. The first of these, THE WISHING RING, was produced by Lee

Shubert at Daly’s with Marguerite Clark and a supporting company thrown

together from the cast of a musical play at that time current in the

theater. Marguerite Clark was charming in the part and later made use of

the play on the road and produced it for a short run in Chicago. THE

WISHING RING was directed by Cecil De Mille and was, I think, the last

thing he did before he left New York and threw in his lot with the

picture people.

The second of these half-hearted matinée productions was made for me by

Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum and gave Laurette Taylor one of her first

chances to show her very extraordinary talent. This play, LOLA, was a

queer sort of fish, part crude melodrama and part a very real and very

fine example of good play writing, but it was one of those plays of

which one must say it is either great or absurd. My shady reputation and

the hasty and careless production made only one answer probable. In

fact, it was many years before the name of Owen Davis was much of a help

to a play, and it would probably have taken me at least a thousand to

establish a trade-mark as a serious dramatist had the public known that

aside from the crimes committed under the name of Owen Davis I must also

answer to many others. I had fallen into the playful habit of inventing

other names to hide my evil deeds. At one time I used so many assumed

names that the mere invention of them became a task and Al Woods used to

help me out by calmly borrowing the name of one of his clerks or

stenographers and writing it down as author of my latest thriller.

When CONVICT 999 was first produced in Pittsburgh, the dramatic critic

of the largest of the morning papers said in his review of the play:

“Here at last is a fine melodrama and heaven be praised. Here, in the

person of John Oliver, a new writer, we have at last found a man who

knows more about how to write a play of this kind than the irrepressible

Owen Davis ever knew.”

William A. Brady was the first to give me a regular Broadway production

with a first class company and in doing so, although he little knew it

at the time, he started an association that lasted for many years. Mr.

Brady is a strong man and had he been able to foresee what was in store

for him the day on which we signed our first contract, it is highly

probable these confessions would never have been written. With great

confidence, however, Mr. Brady commanded me to write him a big melodrama

and as a result Doris Keane and William Courtney appeared in a direful

thing called MAKING GOOD. The title of this play turned out to be a

god-send to the New York critics and if I had put as much wit into my

play as they put into their slaughter of it, Mr. Brady and I would have

been happier even if they had been deprived of a great pleasure. As a

matter of fact, I should be a very popular man with the critics. Several

of them owe their standing as humorists almost entirely to me and at

least one of the finest of them, Frank O’Malley, won his place in the

ranks of humorists over my dead body.

In later years Mr. O’Malley confided to me that he often journeyed miles

to get to a play of mine, a compliment that at the time I quite failed

to value at its true worth.

Twenty-four hours after the first New York production of MAKING GOOD I

was safely hidden in the country with my still loyal wife and two small

sons, luckily at the time too young to know their shame. At once I

started out, quite undismayed, to write another. One old habit that

still clings to me: if I have a failure, to sit down at my desk before I

have so much as slept on it, and write at least part of the next one; as

a matter of fact, most of the good plays I have written have been

started at such a time. Here then, in the wilds of Westchester, I stuck

to it until I finished THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, much the best thing I had

done up to then, and a play that might very well be a success if

produced to-day. The manuscript of this play I sent at once to a

play-broker with instructions to offer it for production with no

author’s name on the manuscript. A few days later the broker called me

up with the startling information that he had sold my play to William A.

Brady—rather dread news as, following what the New York critics had said

about MAKING GOOD, Mr. Brady had thrown me out of his office and

practically forbidden me its sacred ground.

It seemed, so my broker said, that Mr. Brady had paid good money for an

option on the play and was very curious as to the identity of the modest

author. When he learned it, he had something very like a stroke, but in

time he forgave me.

All the years I worked with Mr. Brady were punctuated by terrible fights

between us that always ended in a renewal of friendship and affection.

He is by far the most colorful figure in the American theater and even

when one disagrees with him, which is apt to be rather often, his

strength and his complete belief in his own opinion cause his opponents

awful moments of doubt. If Mr. Brady really set out to convince me that

a red apple was a yellow one, I should at once go and order a new pair

of glasses.

Mr. Brady, David Belasco and Daniel Frohman are the last of the old

guard and, each in his different way, has written his name boldly on the

pages of our drama. Different as these three men are they have one thing

in common: a great and abiding love of the theater and its people.

Mr. Brady and I together did THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, SINNERS, FOREVER

AFTER, AT 9.45 and many others. FOREVER AFTER was Alice Brady’s first

big part; partly owing to its simple, straightforward love story and

partly to her fine performance, it turned out to be one of the best

money-makers I have ever had. These plays were at the moment my idea of

one step up from the NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL of the Al Woods

days.

At about this time the Actors’ Equity Association was formed and pulled

a real battle for their rights against the absurd and vicious standards

of the business. That they won that battle is well-known and that they

deserved to win it is fully admitted by fair-minded and honest managers

of the Sam Harris type—although, of course, if all managers had been of

his type no fight would have been necessary.

The actors’ strike at this time closed all the theaters and, as usual,

the author, who wasn’t in the fight at all and had nothing to win

whatever the outcome, lost much more money than any actor and rather

resented the row being pulled in his front yard. Most authors were in

sympathy with the actors but I know that for one I wished they had

chosen to fight with some other weapons than my three plays, the runs of

which were interrupted and from which I had been drawing a very

considerable royalty.

Hit in the dramatist’s tenderest spot, we met and organized and from

that day to this many of my hours have been given up to service to the

authors’ societies. I was at that time the last president of the old

Society of American Dramatists and Composers and a member of the

Authors’ League. With the help of a handful of ardent spirits, I brought

all the active dramatists of the day into the old society and merged it

with the Authors’ League as the Dramatists’ Guild of the Authors’ League

of America. A group of strong men and women came to the front and served

faithfully on hundreds of committees and through long hours of

conferences. Among the most active of these were Augustus Thomas, James

Forbes, Gene Buck, Rupert Hughes, Channing Pollock, Edward Childs

Carpenter, Percival Wilde, Rachel Crothers, Ann Crawford Flexner, Jules

Goodman and Montague Glass; then later Arthur Richman, George Middleton

and William Cary Duncan and a number of others.

I remained as president of this group until I resigned to take up the

presidency of the Authors’ League and gave, as all these others gave, a

very considerable part of my life for many years. At present, thanks to

our efforts, the dramatists are as well organized as the actors and like

the actor eager at all times for a battle, but we are unfortunately

quite without an adversary, one of the peculiar things about the manager

being that he is unable to agree to anything whatever that any other

manager thinks would be a good thing.

At meetings of the managerial society one man will frequently say: “I

don’t know what Mr. Blank wants to do about this problem, but anything

he thinks I think different.” It is a truly tragic thing that the men

who should be the leaders of the great institution that the American

theater should be have been incapable of enough business foresight to

bind themselves firmly together to protect their interests. Always we

have been out-generaled by the motion picture men, bled white by the

ticket speculator and discriminated against by the railroads, the labor

unions, and even the newspapers, who are by rights our natural allies

and our traditional friends. If the theater is the cultural and the

educational force I have always claimed it was, surely it has a right to

public loyalty and support and I must always think that, if we have in

large part lost that support, it is because the dignity and the

importance of the drama has been hidden by the lack of dignity and the

lack of importance of many of our leaders.

I thought these things in the time of which I am now writing, 1912-1913,

but naturally I had neither the independence of age nor circumstance at

that time to dare to fully express myself. Just before the war I had

begun to be impatient of the machine-made plays I had been writing for

so long and began to listen to my wife’s pleadings to cut down the

quantity and try to improve the quality of my work. She had been begging

me to do this for ten years or more, and like other good husbands I

rather like to do any little thing my wife asks of me—after she has been

asking it for ten years. I really think I wanted to please her, but I

also think that I had by this time outgrown the sentimental comedy-drama

as once before I had outgrown the cheap melodramas. Naturally enough as

soon as I lost my own belief in my form of expression I was no longer

successful in it.

Let no man go unchallenged who in your presence talks of purposely

“writing down” to an audience, or of “giving them what they want” or any

other fish-bait of that description. I am here to tell you that no man

ever successfully wrote or produced any play, or any novel below his own

mental level at the moment. When I wrote NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK

MODEL, I was honestly deeply moved by the lady’s many misfortunes or I

couldn’t have put it over, and when I wrote the comedy-dramas that

followed it I truly believed in them or no audience in the world would

have sat through them. This is always true, I think, of writers or of

managers. We are entirely emotional people and our work reflects us. I

know of several supremely successful producers who made great fortunes

selling the piffle they loved and who, as soon as their money brought

them contacts that resulted in an increase in their taste and knowledge

promptly appointed themselves judges of the drama and even more promptly

went broke.

You may well afford to laugh at the faker who boasts of skill great

enough to assume a mood and color different from his own. The next time

he tells you of how he “wrote down to the boobs” simply tell him he is

either a liar or a fool—probably both. For surely, if he is not a liar,

he must be the greatest fool on earth to use for a cheap success a

genius great enough to have brought him a real one.

[Illustration:

_Faithfully yours,

J. Jefferson_

(_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)

]

[Illustration:

“I have always admired Augustus Thomas”

(_From the Messmore Kendall Collection_)

]

If then, about fifteen years ago, I wanted to write a higher form of

drama it was for no nobler reason than because I had begun to be bored

by the sort of work I was doing and because it bored me it had begun to

bore my audiences. Several times in my life I have been driven to an

advance of this sort and always because of the fact that I found my old

occupation gone. As time goes on, I have come to believe that if I could

live two or three hundred years I might develop into quite a playwright.

In any case I once more threw my box of tricks away and sat down quietly

and tried to study out a new method. In this I was helped by the change

that had begun to come over the drama. I was influenced as all our

writers were at the time by the Russian and Hungarian dramatists who had

discarded the artificial form of the “well-made play” and were writing a

new form of photographic realism that tempted us all to follow in their

footsteps.

As a result I wrote THE DETOUR, which remains in my mind the example of

the best work I have done for the theater. Of all my plays the DETOUR,

THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST (one of the old melodramas of the Al Woods days)

and THE NERVOUS WRECK are my pets. THE DETOUR was produced by Lee

Shubert at the Astor Theatre in the early fall of 1921 and, although it

was never a money-maker, it gave me what I wanted and made my wife very

happy. As she had stuck around by this time for some fifteen years

waiting for something like this to happen, it was, to say the least, no

more than she deserved.

In the production of THE DETOUR I was fortunate enough to be able to

secure Augustin Duncan to play the principal part and to stage the play.

He more than justified the confidence I had in him. To me Mr. Duncan is

a great artist and by far the most sincere example of the man who puts

his art above his pocketbook I have ever met. I suppose more rot has

been spilled out by men and women who pose as “devoted to their art”

than by any other set of posing hypocrites since the world began. We all

of us play the tune we know and to rebuke us for that tune is as silly

as it is to praise us for it. To use what talents we may have to earn a

decent living for ourselves and those dependent upon us is, to a man of

any philosophy, a far finer thing than to sit in a Greenwich Village

attic and mouth jealous platitudes about the baseness of commercial art.

This statement of my opinion is neither a defense nor an alibi. I

myself, as these confessions of mine are describing to you, have always

written for the love of the theater rather than from any art impulse and

I am the first to admit that my love of the theater has always been more

compelling than my love of the drama, if you follow me in the

distinction.

As a practical man, born of a practical line of hard-headed Yanks, I

have studied my own small talents and developed them and tried to make

up for a lack of the real fires of genius by an honest admission of that

lack and a true enthusiasm for the work that at the moment came nearest

to expressing my attitude. The true genius, the true artist, is very

rare, but Augustin Duncan is distinctly of that number. He is quite as

incapable of doing any work that doesn’t seem fine to him as I am of

writing anything at all unless I am going to be paid for it, and he is

as firm in his refusals as I am. And in my life, during which I have

written several million words, I doubt if I have written five thousand

without practical reward.

Max Gordon, one of the managers with whom I have been associated, looked

at me in troubled amazement one day lately when I had made some mildly

humorous comment and said: “That’s the first time I ever heard you say

anything funny for less than ten percent.” Max Gordon, like many others

of my acquaintance, assumes this attitude of mine to be founded on a

desire for money, but as a matter of fact I care very little about money

or the things that money stands for. Any man who can make good can

always make money, but the fun is in the making good, in the thrill and

the sense of power that comes from activities sanely thought out and

successfully accomplished. Under Mr. Duncan’s fine direction THE DETOUR

was molded into shape and ready for its first performance. Not one word

of my original manuscript was changed from the day I wrote it, which

fact is most amazingly to his credit rather than to mine. He is so fine

a director that he molded his company to my play, rather than my play to

his company—the true duty of a director, although few of them have the

sense to know it. To the picture director an author’s play is a sort of

clover field in which he loves to kick up his heels and romp about at

his own sweet will, making any changes at all that his fancy may

dictate, most of them being made for the very simple reason that he

doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of what is on the written page in front

of him. Even in the theater there are few managers who realize the value

of one man’s unbroken line of thought. “Plays are not written, they are

re-written” is a motto often repeated to writers and in the old days

these wise words were proudly framed and hung over the desk of one of

our greatest producers. This musty old truism has been used to slaughter

plays during all the years since Dion Boucicault first uttered it, and

like most other truisms its principal fault lies in the fact that it

isn’t true. When I was in Harvard I met Mr. Boucicault in a barroom on

Bowdoin Square in Boston and, as I looked at him in awe and homage, I

had little thought of ever being bold enough to challenge any of his

theories. Dion Boucicault was a great playwright of the eighties, a man

of sound knowledge of his craft, but like the best of us there were

occasions when he talked nonsense.

Plays are written by their authors. They are good plays or bad plays

depending almost wholly upon the degree of talent of the author plus his

accident of choice of a subject. This goes for pictures as well as for

stage plays. The germ of success is put in only by the original author

in spite of Mr. Boucicault and the combined opinion of the Managers’

Association and the motion picture industry. I am stating here an

important fact upon which I have a great deal of special information. I

doubt if any man alive has ever been called in as a play doctor more

frequently than I, and for the good of my soul I am willing to admit

that I have very rarely saved a patient. I have often seen plays helped

by careful and skillful revision but I have never once seen a play built

into a real success unless the germ of that success was firmly planted

by the author in his first manuscript.

Frequently I have seen, so frequently as to have learned to be in dread

and horror of the practice, sensitive and beautiful plays and picture

stories so coarsened and debased by the rough hands of managers,

directors, supervisors and other quacks, that all hope of success has

been dosed and purged out of them. I am stoutly of the opinion that if

no changes at all in original manuscripts were ever made the percentage

of success both in plays and pictures would be infinitely higher. This

does not in the least mean that I think the author is always right. Of

course he isn’t. Play writing is the most difficult form of all the

forms of literary expression, and no man ever wrote a perfect play. But

I think the trained writer knows more about his business than any one

else can hope to know, and I think it is as silly for an outsider to

meddle with his work as it would be for a kind neighbor to write a few

helpful words in the middle of the prescription you have paid a

physician to prescribe for your sick child.

Every one in the world is, I suppose, a potential story-teller. I am

constantly being asked to read plays written by elevator boys,

maid-servants, policemen and taxi drivers, and it is not surprising that

when a man finds himself in power over a writer he should at once demand

a share of the joy of the creator. But to me play writing is and

scenario writing ought to be a definitely understood and carefully

studied profession; and the outsider without special knowledge or

special talent who undertakes to turn out a masterpiece is in exactly

the same position to do good work as the Irishman who had never tried to

play the violin but had always thought he could do it.

Even in editorial rooms, where a higher class of intelligence is usually

found in authority over the story departments, one notices this

instinctive urge to get a finger into the pie and the theater is cursed

with it; as the picture business is superlative in all things this very

human failing may be found here in its fullest flowering. Just as Tom

Sawyer’s young friends all wanted a turn at whitewashing the fence so do

the picture executives—supervisors, directors, script-girls, cutters,

film-editors, messenger boys, stage-hands and scrub-women—all yearn to

make just the least little bit of a change in a story to satisfy some

instinctive lech to be an author. I have seen so many plays and screen

stories ruined by this enforced collaboration that I honestly look upon

it as the major evil that threatens a young writer’s success.

In the first place it’s a silly custom because once the author

surrenders the integrity of his story he is helpless to even be a fair

judge of the hybrid product that takes its place, and as plays and

stories do not succeed on account of their structural perfection but by

virtue of their spiritual and inspirational qualities, it is obvious

that no man without a creative talent has any right to mess about with

them.

Duncan knew the folly of all this and his skill and instinct resulted in

a fine and sensitive performance.

Again a play of mine was to have its first performance at a holiday

matinée and again, as had happened to me during the first matinée of

THROUGH THE BREAKERS, I was to be given the benefit of an honest lay

opinion of my talents. We opened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, famous

among people of the theater for drawing the prize boob audiences of

America. An audience at any seashore resort is a terrible thing, but in

Asbury Park for some reason its reactions are amazing. Good plays die

and terrible plays are heralded as great, so that the wise author simply

sits in suffering silence with cotton in his ears. Personally as I sat

with my wife through this first performance of THE DETOUR I had been

very happy, so happy in fact that I neglected the cotton, and on my way

out of the crowded theater I heard the first critical opinion of this,

the first attempt on my part to write of life simply and honestly. “Do

you know,” remarked a very pretty young woman as we passed, “I think I

could write a better play than this one myself.” In spite, however, of

this completely honest expression of opinion THE DETOUR gave me a new

standing as a writer of serious plays. Another rusty old saw of the

trade is the one about all the great plays resting in closets, trunks

and unread in managers’ offices, plays so fine that, were they to be

produced, a new drama would spring full grown into being. I have been

looking for one of those for twenty years, but so far it has escaped me.

In all the hundreds of these neglected manuscripts that it has been my

sad fate to have read I found just one real play. When I demanded a

hearing for it and got one, it turned out to be just fair. There is a

real utility about a great play that sooner or later will bring it to

the stage; some one will see it and rave about it and it will get its

chance. It isn’t so difficult to tell a really great play when one reads

it, or a really bad play, it’s the in-between it is difficult to judge,

the degree of badness or of value that means failure or success. Careful

reading of these supposed masterpieces will usually prove rather a

shock. I’ve read a thousand, and I am not the man I was.

The Great War was over by this time and the changes it had brought about

in our moods and our standards was being sharply reflected in the

theater. The motion pictures, successful as they had grown to be, had

not as yet challenged our right to existence and we had begun to produce

something in the nature of an American Drama. Eugene O’Neill had written

several fine plays. Arthur Richman’s AMBUSH, Gilbert Emery’s THE HERO

and my THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were at least a step toward a true folk

play and the rise of the Theatre Guild and of Arthur Hopkins, who to me

has always seemed the great man of the theater in my time, gave fine

promise of fine things.

The Great War had disturbed and sobered me. I was about forty-two years

old at the time America entered it, fat, near-sighted and cursed with a

gouty constitution. Quite obviously I couldn’t fight, and yet, like all

men who stood just across the border line from heroic action, I had my

moments of longing and resentment; here was a big thing and I couldn’t

be part of it. I had been a sort of adventurer all my life and yet when

the greatest adventure of all time was going on I must stand on the side

lines.

Fate had decided that I was to have no real connection with the war. I

was too old, and my two boys were too young. The nearest I came to the

feeling of personal participation was when my youngest brother, Colonel,

then Major, Robert P. Davis, sailed with his regiment for France. My

peace of mind received one slight shock, however, when my oldest son,

Donald, then not quite fourteen, slipped away from Yonkers, where we

were living at the time, and enlisted in the Navy. Exactly what might

have come of that I never will know, for when the young man was marched

with a squad of volunteers to the Battery and lined up before the keen

eye of an officer, he was rudely yanked out of line and sent home to me

with a stern warning which frightened me very much but made no dent at

all in the culprit’s armor. He felt no repentance at all but furiously

cursed the United States Navy for not knowing a good man when they saw

one.

After the war a writer faced a new world. The changes in the form of

play writing speak volumes of the change in our mode of thought and our

standards. When I had written my first plays in the early nineties,

asides were freely spoken. I had frequently written scenes in the old

days in which the lovely heroine sat calmly in a chair, violently

struggling to pretend not to hear the villain and his fellow

conspirators who plotted her undoing in loud voices at a distance of six

feet. The soliloquy was also in good usage, that marvelous aid to the

clumsy craftsman by which all necessity for a carefully reticent

exposition could be laughed aside. I used to start a play, for example,

with a lady alone on the stage as the first curtain rose. She would

perhaps turn sadly away from the window and looking the audience firmly

in its composite eye would exclaim: “Poor John; I wonder if he knows

that I have been untrue to him.” This naturally saved a lot of time and

had a distinct advantage from the audience’s point of view. They had

very little excuse for not knowing what the play was all about.

Deeper, however, than any change in the shifting methods of play writing

was the change in the point of view of our audiences. The “Prodigal Son”

story, the “Cinderella” story, and the “Magdalen” story seemed to have

lost their power; the old one about, “My son shall never marry a

daughter of the Hoosis’s” no longer bit very deep, and the poor

dramatist had to learn all over again.

I can best explain the change that twenty years had brought by telling

of an experience I had with a play called DRIFTWOOD. I wrote this play

in 1905 and read it to a famous star of that time; the lady liked the

part and urged her manager to produce the play, but after long

reflection he decided against it on the grounds that the heroine of my

play had made in her youth what the French writers so politely describe

as “a slip,” and in his experience it was out of the question that any

audience could ever be willing for her, no matter how deep her

repentance, to marry a decent man. Twenty years after I dug this old

faded manuscript out of a trunk and was struck by some scenes of what

seemed to me to be of real power and truth, and again I took it to a

great woman star, whose verdict was “It didn’t seem to her to be about

anything worth making such a fuss about.” And she was as right in her

opinion as the manager of the old days had been in his.

After the production of THE DETOUR I attacked my work from a slightly

different point of view, and my next job was the very pleasant one of

making for my old friend, William A. Brady, the American adaptation of

THE INSECT COMEDY, which was produced as THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. I

followed this with ICEBOUND, which won for me the Pulitzer Prize in 1923

and caused me to be selected as a member of the National Institute of

Arts and Letters.

I had some adventures with ICEBOUND before I got it on the stage and got

myself into a terrible mess that grew deeper as its success grew more

assured. David Belasco had seen THE DETOUR and had written me that if I

could write another play as good he would gladly produce it at once. I

sent him the manuscript of ICE BOUND as soon as I completed it, and in a

few days had a telegram from him saying that he liked it very much and

asked me to see Mr. Roder, his manager, and arrange the details of a

contract. The next day I called on Ben Roder, whom I had known for many

years, and he offered me a contract containing a clause giving Mr.

Belasco the right to produce the play at any time during the next two

years. Mr. Belasco was away with David Warfield’s production of THE

MERCHANT OF VENICE and Mr. Roder was a bit impatient of my objection to

the clause I have mentioned. I have always been in a hurry all my life,

and I had caught from Al Woods during my long association with him his

ardent desire to see a play on the stage the very moment he falls in

love with it. Neither yesterday nor to-morrow ever meant very much to

me; to-day has always been the right time to produce any play that I had

faith in. This fact is so well known to the men with whom I do business

that it is no longer necessary for me to tell them that if they want to

do a play of mine at all they must start casting it the very hour after

they have first read it. Mr. Roder, however, was not quite used to my

rather stormy manner, and the result of our talk was an angry outburst

on my part.

“Mr. Belasco,” I said, “will give me a contract before noon on Monday

for an immediate production or he can’t have the play.” Such language is

all out of line in the Belasco office, and Mr. Roder smiled a kindly and

tolerant smile as I walked out of his office, merely remarking that he

didn’t think I was quite crazy enough to turn down a Belasco production.

I have always been a free lance in the theater and perhaps a bit

militant in my stand for an author’s rights and his prerogatives, and I

made up my mind to go through with my bluff unless Mr. Belasco came to

my terms. On Monday I would sell my play to some one else. With this in

view I took all four of my remaining manuscripts under my arm, and by

noon I had placed three of them with managers of good standing, in each

case saying that the play must be purchased by Monday noon or not at

all, in each case walking out of the office followed by an exact

duplicate of Mr. Roder’s tolerant but unbelieving smile.

It was noon and I was hungry, so, with my remaining manuscript tucked

into my overcoat pocket, I dropped into the grill room of the old

Knickerbocker Hotel for lunch. During lunch young Max Gordon, whom I had

known since his boyhood, sat down for a moment at my table for a

friendly chat. Max Gordon and Al Lewis had been successful vaudeville

agents and had recently owned interests in several plays, but as yet had

made no productions under their own names. Max was always of an

inquiring turn of mind and very little escapes him. One glance at the

yellow envelope sticking out of my overcoat pocket was enough.

“How’s your new play?” was his first start. His second was to calmly

stretch out his hand and take my last manuscript out of my pocket and

transfer it to his own. “I’d like to read it,” he blandly observed, and

in spite of some protest on my part he walked out of the room with it in

his pocket. I had already covered the three managers who, aside from Mr.

Belasco, had seemed to me to be best fitted to produce this play and I

went home. The next day being Saturday, I went up to St. Andrews for my

usual week-end game of golf with my golfing partner, Bob Davis, Bob

being no blood kin of mine but a very dear friend of many years’

standing. Sunday morning the bell of my apartment rang and Mr. Max

Gordon walked calmly in and dropped a thousand dollars on my table and

blandly announced that “we are going to produce ICEBOUND.” Questioned as

to the “we” part of it he replied that Sam Harris and Al Lewis had read

the play and that Mr. Harris had offered to put it out under his trade

mark with Lewis and Gordon as silent but active partners. Sam Harris

could then, as he could now, have anything of mine he wanted, so I

promptly shook hands and called it a trade.

Then the storm broke. By ‘phone, by letter and by telegram every one of

the managers whom I had given until Monday noon to buy my play sent

messages that they would produce it, and it took me about five years to

square myself.

As a matter of fact I have never been able to see the justice in the

trade custom of never submitting a play to more than one manager at a

time. If I own a house and want to sell it, I give that house to more

than one agent, and the grocer who displays a particularly fine melon on

his stand doesn’t consider it the property of the first customer who

admires it. Before it’s anybody’s but his some one must pay good money

for it. Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never

lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he

is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in

the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he

allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent

expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes.

[Illustration:

ROBERT H. DAVIS

(_Photo by F. X. Cleary_)

]

I first learned of the fact that ICEBOUND had won the Pulitzer Prize

from Al Woods, who called me up and told me the news. He was, I think,

as much excited as I, and perhaps he knew better than any one else what

a far cry it was from our old Bowery melodramas to the winning of the

prize for the best play of 1923. A lot of water had flowed under the

mill in those twenty-five years, and to throw so completely aside a

hard-won method and adopt another so radically different was a very

difficult thing. Since then I have served several times on the committee

to award the prize, and I have never voted to give it to a dramatist

without recalling my own pleasure in listening to Al Woods’ voice over

the ‘phone when he called up and said: “Listen, sweetheart, who do you

think cops the Pulitzer Prize this year?—you’d never guess—neither would

I—a guy told me—it’s you!”

[Illustration:

Owen Davis and his two sons, Donald and Owen, Jr.

(_Photograph by Atlantic Photo Service_)

]

During the run of ICEBOUND Bob Davis ruined a golf game by telling me

about a new story he was about to publish. It was, so he told me,

written by E. J. Rath, but, as a matter of fact, it had in all

probability sprung from his own amazing mind, as have literally hundreds

of other stories that have appeared under the names of our most famous

writers. Bob has been for many years the dry nurse of American fiction

and responsible for the present fame of more successful novelists and

short story writers than any one man who has ever lived. This story that

he called _The Wreck_ bored me very much and quite ruined my game, as

Bob usually saves his loudest and most startling statements until I am

at the top of my back swing; so to keep him quiet I told him to shut up

and I’d read the fool thing if he would send it to me. When I read the

proof sheets, all I could find there was a very amusing character, but

urged on by Bob I finally agreed to try my best to make a play out of

it. The play was THE NERVOUS WRECK, probably one of the most successful

farces of the last twenty years.

As soon as I finished this play I took it to Sam Harris, who read it

promptly and told me it was terrible. As I fully agreed with him, we

decided to have it tried out on the west coast, figuring that the

further we got it from the sight of our friends the better. Mr. Harris

had at that time some business relations with Thomas Wilks of Los

Angeles, and the play was announced for production by him. After the

first rehearsal Mr. Wilks’ stock company went on strike and refused to

play the thing, saying that it was without a doubt the worst play ever

written by mortal man. It was only after a battle that they were forced

to continue.

Mr. Edward Horton who first played the part has since told me that he

was never in his life so startled as he was by the screams of laughter

that followed his first scene, and he and the leading lady got together

after the first performance and hastily learned their lines, a thing

that up to that time they had not thought it worth while to do. The

farce played in Los Angeles for twelve weeks to enormous business, but

Mr. Harris and I were still a bit doubtful and rather reluctantly

started to put together a cast for an eastern tryout. We put it on in

Atlantic City with Mr. Horton and Miss Frances Howard, now Mrs. Samuel

Goldwyn, in the leading parts. After the first performance Mr. Harris

confided in me that he had always thought it the worst play he had ever

seen and that now he was sure of it. I had very little if any more faith

than he had, and we returned to New York together in disgust. But to our

amazement the fool thing did a big week’s business and we decided to see

it once more during the following week in Long Branch. At Long Branch we

saw it before a half empty house and decided we would close it up, and

that I would work on it at my leisure.

I re-wrote it completely seven different times, and each time Mr. Harris

liked it just a little bit less. It kicked around the office for a year

before Al Lewis picked it up in an idle moment and insisted on our once

again tempting fate with it.

The third cast we selected for this outcast of ours was headed by Otto

Kruger and June Walker. Otto said it was terrible and almost walked out

on us, but at last we got it on in Washington, where Mr. Harris said he

would come to see it with an unprejudiced eye. This time he only

remarked that he’d be damned if he knew why he had ever bothered with

the thing, but if it was any fun for me to mess about with such truck he

had no objection to my seeing what I could do. Messing about with a

farce isn’t exactly fun, and I almost killed myself working over it.

During the next week in Baltimore, Mr. Harris wired me that a failure at

his New York theater was leaving his house dark, and that he had booked

THE NERVOUS WRECK to open there the following Monday. By that time I had

the play in pretty good shape. Al Lewis, Sam Forrest and I had been at

it night and day, but I had no last act at all. A farce without a last

act is a pretty sad affair, and one night in desperation I remembered a

hot comedy scene I had in an unproduced farce called THE HAUNTED HOUSE.

I promptly pulled the scene bodily out of one play and stuck it into

another.

This scene, the examination of some cowboys on a ranch by a young

eastern highbrow who used the methods of laboratory psychology, made the

play’s success, but left me in an awful mess when the time came to

produce THE HAUNTED HOUSE, which was now without any last act at all.

One act, however, has always been a little thing in my life, and I stuck

something in the hole left by the missing scene, and with the late

Wallace Eddinger in the leading part, THE HAUNTED HOUSE did well enough

for a season.

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

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CHAPTER VI ◆ HOW TO WRITE THREE HUNDRED PLAYS

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I love farce, but of all the forms of dramatic writing it is by all odds

the most difficult and demands more hard work and more technical

dexterity of the writer than any other.

A good farce, in the first place, must have a plot that could as easily

be told as a tragedy, and a character not only essentially true but

completely familiar to any audience; and it must have at least three

times as much situation in it as any other type of play.

We hear a lot of late of the technique of play writing, and I have grown

a bit impatient of some of the dogmatic drivel laid before the eyes of

would-be dramatists. In reality the dramatist sails on uncharted seas.

There is no master to whose word he can bow, and no oracle to whom he

can submit his questions. The only way to write a good play is to make

it good. If I were asked to put into one sentence the result of my

experience as a writer, I should say: “Dream out a story about the sort

of persons you know the most about, and tell it as simply as you can.”

Of course, rules for play writing don’t mean anything, not even that the

writer who lays down the rules ever uses them himself. He may be like

the cook who prefers to go out to lunch, and yet I have picked up one or

two tricks, short cuts, easy ways to do hard things, and I am going to

write a few of them down in the faint hope of their being of some slight

help to a beginner.

Of course, the usual way to learn to write is by repeated failure, by

doing almost everything so badly that the awful consequences are so

deeply burned into one’s memory that each disaster has resulted in being

so terrified of one particular blunder that it can never be repeated.

Technique is, as I understand it, simply a facing of certain facts, a

realization of some mistakes, a summing up of some experiences of one’s

self or of others, into an expressed formula. I think I believe in that.

It is a good thing to know thoroughly all the rules of play writing

(only there really aren’t any). These rules, the result of one’s own

experience or the theories of others should be carefully learned, and

then twice as carefully forgotten. Conscious technique in any art is

very painful. The sculptor knows that under his clay are the trusses to

hold up his figure, but he doesn’t let them show. It might be well to

note, however, that if he forgot to put them in, his beautiful figure

would be a shapeless mass on the floor.

Of course, the man who knows the most about play writing doesn’t write

the best plays, but quite as surely knowing a little about his trade

isn’t going to hurt him. I quarrel sometimes with my friend, M. L.

Malevinsky, over the real value of this special knowledge. To me play

writing is almost entirely an emotional thing, and in the foreword I

wrote for his quite remarkable book on THE TECHNIQUE OF THE DRAMA I

tried to express my feeling of the limitations of technical knowledge by

writing: “It is probable that the hedge sparrow has quite as much

technique as the meadow lark, but only the song bird can sing.”

If you care to read the few observations I am about to write down, read

them with the thought that they aren’t meant to be too slavishly

followed; they are not words of wisdom at all, they are simply scars

from the battlefield, and they are only meant as a sort of protective

mechanism to save your fingers from being burned as deeply as my own

have been.

* * * * *

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

writing about.

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

remembering.

3. After your story has shaped itself in your mind, tell it to yourself

over and over and over again—then try it on some one else. Wives are

good; they have to stand for it. Let the first thing you put down on

paper be an outline narrative of your play, written in two hundred

words. If your story won’t go into two hundred words, throw it away. The

next step is to write several more outlines, at first in narrative form.

Later put in a little dialogue, not probably to be used in your final

copy, but to give you a growing acquaintance with your characters.

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

situations in themselves.

5. Be absolutely sure of your last scene before you write a word of your

first act. Paul Potter, a master of the form of play writing, was the

first to tell me that the French dramatists always wrote their last act

first. I have never quite done that, but I do try to know exactly what I

am going to do with my characters at the end of the play before I start

out. One of the oldest mechanical rules of play writing is, Act 1 plus

Act 2 equal Act 3. I have altered that a little in my own work, and I

think I could express it as: the characters of Act 1 multiplied by the

emotions of Act 2 equal Act 3. A play really is a character driven by an

emotion along a definite line to a definite end. Mr. Malevinsky states

somewhat the same thing. I fully agree with him that every play

expresses a definite emotion, but I do not think the author is or should

be conscious of the fact. In the end any carefully written play results

in a story line marked out by one character, driven by one dominant

emotion to the definite climax of that emotion—success, failure, love,

death, whatever it may be. But if one wants a successful play, it must

have an ending absolutely made imperative by what has happened in the

first part of your story, plus what has happened in the second part. If

two-thirds of the way through you have a possible choice as to the

outcome, you will have a failure every time. Authors write first acts

and second acts, but the audience writes all good last acts. A modern

audience cares very little whether your play ends happily or not, but

they insist upon its ending along the line you yourself have started it

on, and audiences know a lot more about play writing than any dramatist

ever knew.

6. Don’t try to tell of the sort of life you don’t know anything about.

If you know the little girl next door, tell a story about her—forget the

King of France.

7. If, after you have written a speech, and read it over and find it

sounds very beautiful to you, cross it out; beauty in the modern play is

in the thought, not in the words. This is a tough lesson for us

old-timers to learn, and to this day the last thing I do before I send

my manuscript on its first journey is to comb it over for stray

“effective speeches” or bits of bombast, once my specialty and now my

bitterest enemy.

8. Don’t give a thought as to how big or how little your cast is, or how

much or how little your production is going to cost. If it’s a good play

it can’t cost too much, and if it’s a bad one it can’t help it.

9. Get yourself in the habit of reading over all you have written

previously before you start each day’s work, and as the manuscript grows

force yourself to be more and more critical of what you have done. A

play should consist of at least a hundred thousand words, twenty

thousand on paper and eighty thousand in the waste basket.

10. Don’t worry about how long it is going to take you to finish your

task; it doesn’t matter. Some days you won’t be able to write at all,

and other days you can’t stop writing. I have written through hundreds

of lunch and dinner hours and thousands of business and social

appointments. Don’t let any one bother you when you are writing or

anything. If the ‘phone rings, don’t answer it, and if your wife rebels,

divorce her. Nothing and nobody is important when the thoughts are

boiling. Nobody expects a dramatist to be a respectable member of

society, and any crime is justified. If you find yourself bored at your

desk go and play golf, play anything, but stop writing. If you find

yourself in your stride keep at it. I wrote one entire act of THE DETOUR

without getting up from my chair, sixty-five hundred words in longhand

in eight hours. Teach yourself this trick of crawling into your shell

like a mud turtle and letting the world roll by.