ten may secure the coveted prize, and not more than one person out of
that ten makes a decent living from his or her adopted profession. It
is too much to say that one aspirant in a thousand achieves real
success. The average salary in the chorus is $18, and for speaking
parts in dramatic performances it cannot be more than $40. No one is
paid during the period devoted to rehearsal, and a long season lasts
somewhere between thirty and thirty-five weeks. The sane way of
computing wages in the theatrical business, therefore, is to multiply
by thirty and divide the result by fifty-two. Following this system,
it will be seen that the seeming $40 a week really is only $23. The
most ardent and ambitious among the stage-struck will admit that this
is not an income permitting the employment of a chauffeur or the
purchase of a palatial residence on Riverside Drive.
Nor is the matter of remuneration the only disappointment connected
with entrance into the theatrical profession. This is the one vocation
in which the worker must begin again every year. If the
fairly-successful actor "gets something" for the current season, he
will find almost equal difficulty in getting something else for the
season to follow. Unless he has made a prodigious hit--and prodigious
hits are very rare--he finds himself no farther advanced next June
than he was last September. Should he be lucky enough to remain in New
York, he occupies a hall room in a boarding house, and, failing in
this doubtful good fortune, he faces a long term on "the road."
Excepting only solitary confinement in prison, the world probably
holds no terror surpassing that of touring the "one night stands."
Lost to his best friends and companions, travelling at all hours of
the day and night, grateful for board and lodging that would not be
tolerated by a domestic servant, the player with a small road company
has ample reason to repent his choice of a career. To illustrate the
universal dread of this fate, I quote the lines printed under a comic
picture in the Christmas issue of a prominent dramatic weekly:
DOCTOR--You're pretty badly run down, my friend. I should
advise change of scene.
PATIENT--(Just returned from thirty weeks of "one night stands"
with the Ripping Repertoire Company). Heaven have mercy on me!
(He dies).
Of course, it is quite futile to recite facts like these to the
victim of stage fever. That unhappy individual is certain that he or
she will positively enjoy such discomforts as your feeble fancy can
paint, and doubly sure that the ugly present will fade into a roseate
future just as it does in the transformation scene at the end of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin." Tell this adventurer that one histrion in a
thousand succeeds and your reply is bound to be: "I'll be that one."
And, to speak truth, he or she _may_ be that one. Celebrated actors
are made from queer material sometimes, and the roster of well-known
people on our stage includes the names of men and women who were
originally plumbers, waitresses, floor-walkers and cloak-models. The
beginner may be positive, however, that these players did not advance
while they still had the intellects and the training required in the
occupations mentioned. No person can possibly succeed on the dramatic
stage without the foundation of genuine talent and a superstructure of
culture and education. A woman whose pronunciation betrayed the
baseness of her early environment could not win enduring fame if she
had the temperament of a Bernhardt.
Generally, however, the woman who thinks she has the temperament of a
Bernhardt really has only anaemia and a great deal of vanity. If she
has not mistaken her symptoms, and, besides genuine ability, has a
good education, some money, infinite patience, an iron constitution,
and a mind made up to the bitterness of long waiting and constant
disappointment, she may eventually win a position half as important
and a fourth as agreeable as that which she pictured in her
imagination.
She is far luckier if her desire to go on the stage proves akin to and
as fleeting as the average small boy's desire to be a burglar.
_ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY_
Being an account of intrepid explorations in the habitat of the
creatures whose habits are set forth in the preceding chapters.
The Great White Way is a recumbent letter I. It is recumbent because
the _habitues_ of the Rialto have used it to the point of exhaustion,
and because streets are never vertical except in Naples. The Rialto is
the name by which The Great White Way was known before the present
reckless mania for electric signs suggested the more significant
appellation. In that long-ago time one who spoke of the district in
question referred to Broadway between the Star Theatre and the office
of The Dramatic Mirror. The Great White Way is bounded on the South by
the Flatiron Building, on the West by the Metropolitan Opera House, on
the North by an enormous incandescent spread-eagle advertising a
certain kind of beer, and on the East by the Actors' Society.
Around these material landmarks runs an invisible but insurmountable
wall of clannishness and complacent self-satisfaction. To be on the
Great White Way you have only to leave the Subway at Times Square; to
be of it you must follow the Biblical camel through the eye of a
needle.
[Illustration: "_The Great White Way is a recumbent letter I_"]
There isn't another Great White Way on the face of the earth. Paris
has its Place de l'Opera, London its Strand, and Vienna its
Ringstrasse, but these resemble New York's theater path only as a
candle resembles an arc light. They are streets given up to seekers
after pleasure; the Rialto is a street given up to seekers after
pleasure, and to seekers after seekers after pleasure. It is not the
moths attracted to the flame that lend particular interest to the
Great White Way; it is the flame itself, coruscating, scintillant,
multi-hued and glowing. Broadway, within the limits set down, is a
street of players and playhouses; the only mile of pavement in the
world devoted entirely to the members of one profession.
Two newspaper buildings rear themselves defiantly in this portion of
New York. They seem out of place, though newspaper men are
night-workers, too, and come nearer than any other class of men to
being _of_ The Great White Way. A few tailors and haberdashers have
intruded themselves into the district, settling beside wig makers and
sellers of grease paint, but they are neither numerous nor
ostentatious. Broadway, as you walk from Twenty-third Street to
Forty-seventh, unfolds itself to the view as a line of theaters,
theatrical offices, agencies and all-night restaurants. Outsiders go
there to see performances and to eat; insiders make of it a world of
their own--a queer little, blear little world of unclear visions,
abnormal instincts, unreal externals and astigmatic sense of
proportion.
Parisians call their actors "_M'as-tu-vu_", which means "Have you seen
me?" That is because the first question a French actor asks is "Have
you seen me in such-and-such a role?" Your true American actor doesn't
waste time with a question of that sort. He feels a peaceful
certainty that not to know him argues yourself unknown, and he
wouldn't like to hint at such obscurity for an acquaintance. Take all
the talk of all the year on The Great White Way, run it through a
wringer, and you will have that same letter I, with vanity dripping
from every inch of the texture. Such egotism as the rest of creation
entertains is watered brandy to that of the Thespian. He thinks of
only one thing, he can talk of only one thing, all the affairs in the
world are inconsequential in comparison with that one thing, and that
one thing is himself. Stand at my elbow while I halt my friend Junius
B. Starr at the corner of Fortieth and Broadway. "How are you, old
man?" say I.
"Fine", is his reply. "Been playing the 'heavy' with Florence Rant
since November. Everybody said I 'hogged the show.'"
Half a block farther along we will have occasion to mention a business
matter to Sue Brette. "My agent tells me you would go into vaudeville
if you had a 'sketch.' She mentioned the possibility of my writing one
for you."
"Yes. I spoke to her about your giving me a part like the one I played
in 'The Greatness of the Small.' You know that was the engagement I
lost because I was so much better than the leading woman. She took the
piece off and revived 'Across the Divide', and I handed in my notice.
The play ended with me dancing on the table--"
Twenty minutes later we saunter on with a store of minute information
regarding Miss Brette's performance, and how it was enjoyed by the
world at large, but with our minds still in Darkest Africa so far as
the business of the meeting is concerned.
Most people are self-conscious when they speak highly of themselves.
Not so actors, to whom such statements as "Everybody said I was the
best they had ever seen" or "Alan Dale came three nights running just
to watch me" are simply a matter of course. Long thought in this
strain has so accustomed the people of the stage to talking in the
same fashion that they find nothing extraordinary about it. Then, too,
his distorted sense of proportion makes the actor see himself so large
and the rest of the world so small that he cannot conceive of any mind
which will not grasp, with unalloyed delight, at first-hand
information regarding himself. Newspapers have flattered your average
histrion into the idea that an eager humanity waits impatiently for
accounts of his most unimportant doings. During the term of my press
agency, a certain comedienne whose specialty is burnt cork ran after
me along Broadway one afternoon, crying: "Stop! I've got a great news
'story' for you."
[Illustration: "_The actor sees himself so large, and the rest of the
world so small_"]
I stopped. "What is it?" I inquired.
"A man came up to me as I was leaving the stage door and said: 'Why,
you're not really colored, after all!'"
A star of my acquaintance recently dismissed an excellent business
manager because that individual mentioned the author of the play in
his advertising. "You're not working for Scribble; you're working for
me", was his comment. Another has ceased to be a friend because I told
him that I didn't care for his performance. A third has clippings of
the criticisms that have treated him best pasted on the inside of his
card case and shows them to you if he can get your ear and your
button-hole.
Everybody talks shop a good deal, but shop is the _only_ thing talked
on The Great White Way. Art and science and literature, politics and
wars and national calamities have no interest, if they have so much as
existence, for the player. "Awful catastrophe that earthquake in
'Frisco!" I exclaimed to an intimate I met at breakfast five or six
years ago.
"By George, yes!" said he. "Costs me twenty weeks I had booked over
the Orpheum Circuit."
Your shoe dealer, though he converses about shoes from eight in the
morning until six at night, at least drops the subject during the
evening. The typical histrion reads nothing in the papers except the
theatrical news and refuses steadfastly to discourse on any other
subject. This is equally true of the manager.
[Illustration: "_Alan Dale came three nights running_"]
The theatrical world is as much of and to itself as though the Rialto
were a tiny island isolated in the waters of the Pacific. It has its
own language, its own daily journal, its own celebrities and its own
great events. The jargon spoken would be absolutely unintelligible to
a layman. "I doubled the heavy and a character bit because the Guv'ner
said cuttin' everything down was our only chance to stay out. We hit
'em hard in Omaha, and it looked like a constant sell out to me, but
the Guv'ner swore the show was a frost and we was playin' to paper."
What would be your translation of this, gentle reader? Doesn't sound
like English, does it? Yet it is--English as you hear it on Broadway.
The Telegraph is the organ of the theatrical profession. It is a
morning paper published at midnight for the benefit of a clientele
that has plenty of time for reading between that hour and bed time.
The Telegraph is the connecting link between the last editions of the
"yellow" evening papers, most of which, by the way, are pink, and the
"bull dog editions" of the regular morning papers. It is the one daily
in the world devoted exclusively to sport and the theater. To its
editorial staff and its readers a declaration of war between England
and France wouldn't be worth half the space given to a street fight
between two matinee idols. The followers of this journal might be a
trifle shakey as to the identity of Christopher Wren, but they could
answer without hesitation any question relating to "Ted" Marks. They
are awake to conditions, physical and domestic, utterly strange to
outsiders, and understand personal allusions that would be Greek to
the best-informed editorial writer on The London Times. If you picked
up a newspaper and read "Famous Sayings of Great Men--Charles Hepner
Meltzer: 'If it's hair it's here'" you would be mystified, yet fifty
thousand theatrical people read that quip on the day of its
publication and laughed at it heartily.
The populace of The Great White Way is not more sharply individual in
its mentality than in its personality. You could not possibly mistake
the types that congregate on street corners or shuttle to and fro on
business bent. The stoutish, smooth-shaven, commonplace-looking young
fellow who passes you with a stride is a well-known dramatic author
whose latest play is in its third month at a near-by theater. The
long-haired man behind him whom you notice because of his deep-set
eyes, his tapering fingers and his important bearing is not the great
genius that you may suppose him, but an ambitious provincial come to
town to market his first comedy. Sybilla Grant, whose real name is
Carrie O'Brien, and who gets eighteen dollars per week for wearing a
five hundred dollar gown conspicuously in the chorus at the Casino,
drives to the door of Rector's, while the most prosperous and
profitable woman star in America walks quietly down Broadway, a demure
little figure in a gray tailor-made gown. The old actor, with frayed
linen and threadbare suit, idles about, a trifle the worse for
liquor, inquiring after opportunities; the young actor flaunts along
in company with a well known theatrical lawyer or a soubrette
conspicuous for the fearfulness and wonderfulness of her millinery and
her coiffure. Dogs you see in plenty, attached and unattached, but no
children. The Great White Way is a childless path.
There are so many celebrities on Broadway that, if you are a familiar
of the street, you cease to regard them with awe. Men and women whose
names fill newspapers and whose pictures crowd magazines meet you at
every turn. During the hour's time required for lunching I have seen
in one hotel eating room Henry Arthur Jones, Charles Klein, John
Kendrick Bangs, Winthrop Ames, George Ade, Paul West, Edgar Selwyn,
Roy McCardell, Victor Herbert, Reginald De Koven, Raymond Hubbell,
Manuel Klein, Archie Gunn, Hy. Mayer, David Warfield, Frank Keenan,
Robert Hilliard, William Faversham, Wilton Lackaye, Theodore Roberts,
Henry Miller, Arnold Daly, W. H. Crane, Francis Wilson, Edmund
Breese, Henry Woodruff, Sam Bernard, Charles J. Ross, Daniel Frohman,
Henry B. Harris, Lee Shubert, Fred W. Whitney, Charles B. Dillingham,
J. W. Jacobs, Ben Roeder, David Belasco, Joseph Brooks, Marc Klaw and
Abraham L. Erlanger. The gentleman who was sharing my table called
attention to the gathering and remarked that if the building should
tumble about our ears, the result would be temporary paralysis in
theatricals.
[Illustration: "_Gets eighteen dollars per week for wearing a five
hundred dollar gown_"]
The Great White Way has certain hostelries at which certain classes in
"the profession" lunch, dine and sup habitually. Nearly every manager
of importance in New York goes to the Knickerbocker, the Madrid, or to
Rector's, the former place being popular also with the better sort of
actors. Shanley's, the Astor, the Cadillac, Browne's Chop House and
Keene's, which is in the old home of the Lambs Club, also are popular,
while the faster set, notably including the well known women of
musical comedy, affect Churchill's. In the vicinity of The Times
Building, and again in the neighborhood of The Herald, are a number of
little restaurants in which unlucky players and very busy managers can
get food cheaply and quickly. These places are to be recognized
generally by the white enamel lettering on their windows and by the
fact that they employ women as waiters. The busy manager aforesaid
goes into them fearlessly; the unlucky player contents the inner man
in the rear of the room and then stands complacently smoking his five
cent cigar in front of the more expensive eating-house next door.
There is the same divergence of character in lodging places on the
Rialto. Above Forty-second Street one finds fashionable apartment
houses in which prominent players keep rooms the year around. Farther
down are hotels in which the less-successful histrion stops when he is
in town, and the cross streets still closer to the foot of the The
Great White Way are full of theatrical boarding houses, in which a
good room may be had at four dollars per week and food and lodging at
sums varying from seven to ten dollars. The four clubs that appeal
especially to "the profession" are the Lambs, the Players, the
Greenroom and the Friars. The first of these is the most expensive,
the most luxurious, and the most liked by the gilded set. It occupies
a new and beautiful building on Forty-fourth Street near Broadway. The
Players, founded by Edwin Booth, is quiet, conservative and elegant,
inhabiting now, as it did in the beginning, an old-fashioned structure
in Gramercy Park. The Greenroom Club and The Friars are younger and
crowd themselves into less pretentious quarters on Forty-seventh and
Forty-fifth Streets. The Greenroom caters especially to managers, and
The Friars was founded by press agents.
The theaters near Broadway are too well known to call for much
comment. They include all the playhouses of the better class, about
thirty-five in number, beginning with Wallack's and ending with the
New Theater. A great majority of the big--I'm not alluding to
physical appearance--producers have their executive offices in these
Temples of Thespis. The Knickerbocker Theater Building shelters many
of them, as do the Broadway Theater Building, the Gaiety Theater
Building and the Putnam Building. Charles Frohman works in a tidy and
well furnished apartment in the Empire Theater Building, which is
tenanted almost exclusively by his staff. The Shuberts have
headquarters in what was once the Audubon Hotel, opposite the Casino,
at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street, and Klaw and Erlanger transact
their business in the New Amsterdam Theater Building. The New York
Theater Building, the Hudson Theater Building, the George M. Cohan
Theater Building, the Astor Theater Building, and even that home of
burlesque, the Columbia Theater Building, all are honey-combed with
offices.
The word "honey-combed" is used advisedly. All day long, all year
'round these offices are veritable hives of business. The layman has
not the least conception of the amount of activity necessary to
theatrical production. It is not too much to say that such an office
as that of Klaw & Erlanger is visited by no fewer than two thousand
persons _per diem_ and that as many letters are dispatched from it.
Such buildings as those mentioned are most crowded from July to
December. Regardless of the fact that theatrical companies are made up
nowadays almost entirely by the process of sending for the players who
are wanted, thousands of men and women in search of work begin their
annual promenade late in June. They wait patiently, hour after hour,
in outer offices, where the men usually find seats and the women
generally stand. The matinee idol who last season nightly shouldered
the blame for a great crime in order to shield the brother of the girl
he loved, pushes past scores of girls somebody loves in order to be
first before the desk of the manager. Through the long summer months,
The Great White Way, whiter than ever in the dazzling heat of the sun,
is thronged with seekers after employment in the most overcrowded
profession in the world. From place to place they go, from manager's
office to agency, securing nothing more definite than the suggestion
that they leave their names and addresses.
Of late the Rialto in summer has been so crowded with loungers that a
special squad of police has been required to keep the way open to
ordinary pedestrians. Knots of players, the men recognizable by their
smooth-shaven faces and mobile mouths, the women by that peculiar
independence of convention which characterizes the feminine portion of
"the profession", group themselves everywhere. Seeing a hub of people,
with projecting spokes made up of dogs on strings, you may be quite
sure of the conversation. "I could 'a' been with 'Get-Rich-Quick
Wallingford', but everybody had it touted for a failure, so I signed
for stock in Minneapolis. We only lasted two weeks. If the manager'd
had any nerve, I think we'd 'a' won out. The whole town was talking
about my work in 'Salomy Jane', and, my dear, you know what I could
'a' done in 'Brewster's Millions'!"
The soil most favorable to the growth of these groups is in front of
the Actors' Society, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Knickerbocker
Theater Building, and the Putnam Building. The "sportier" class of men
congregate before the Hotel Albany, where they cooly ogle the women
who pass. Never by any chance does one find a manager in a gathering
like this--not even a salaried manager or a press agent. "Hold
themselves aloof", you think; and they do, not only from these folk of
the lower crust, but from the best class of actors as well. Race
hatred and political prejudice are as nothing in comparison with the
feeling between the business man of the theater and the player. Each
despises the other, more or less secretly, and, except on the neutral
ground of the Lambs', each "herds" alone.
The Great White Way is most nearly deserted at nine in the morning.
Then the rounder has gone to bed and the workman has not yet risen.
Surface cars laden with humanity pass and repass, but they do not
disgorge in the Rialto. The shop doors yawn widely, displaying blank
faces to the straggling typists who wander by. Hotel dining-rooms are
deserted, chairs piled upon the tables, and sleepy waiters leaning
disconsolately against the walls. Lowered curtains betray the
tardiness of the people whose duty it is to open the offices of
agents, play-brokers, and managers. Even the theater lobbies are
vacant. Ten o'clock brings prosperous-looking men, hustling to and
fro; and eleven sees the beginning of the actors' parade. By noon
Broadway is a river of humanity, flowing steadily to the sea of
Ambition.
It is not until night, however, that it becomes clear why the street
should have the name that has been given it. Then the hundreds of
queer-looking signs you have seen through the day suddenly take on
light and life; burning blue birds fly "for happiness", glittering
chariot-horses race beneath illuminative memoranda of the virtues of
table waters, sparkling wine pours itself iridescently into a glowing
glass; millions of little electric jewels flash in the darkness;
whole buildings burst into premeditated flame; facades blaze like
giant fireworks ignited for a festival; and Broadway becomes in truth
The Great White Way. Standing beside The Herald Building and staring
northward, one sees a horizontal tower of glistening globes, the
"river of humanity" with a wonderful electric display on its banks.
The cars now begin to give up throngs from their lighted interiors,
pedestrians block the sidewalks, policemen shrill their regulation of
traffic, at Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue the crush of
carriages is well-nigh impassible. Fifty thousand people pour into the
playhouses, to pour out again three hours later, super-man to become
supper man, and to add his grandeur, and his lady's, to the crowded
lobster palaces that line this dazzling path of pleasure. These are
darkened in time, and there are left only the all-night restaurants.
The streets grow quiet, and the pink dawn, unseen save by the
watchmen, unfolds itself over the house-tops. One by one the stars
disappear, fading into the day, as will those other stars, so little,
so infinitesimal, so transient a part of that tiny world which they in
their vainglory have christened The Great White Way.
_WHAT HAPPENS AT REHEARSALS_
Being something about the process by which performances are got
ready for the pleasure of the public and the profit of the
ticket speculators.