Читать книгу My First Fifty Years in the Theatre - Owen Davis - Страница 4

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(The Plays, the Players, the Dramatists and the Theatrical Managers as I came in Contact with them between 1897 and 1907)

In the fifty years, from 1897, when I made my very humble and faltering entrance into it, the American Theatre became for the first time a business. Before that it was a rather slap happy sort of a racket where practically nobody at all ever made any real money and nobody ever really expected to. It is true that one or two great showmen had been developed, P. T. Barnum, Oscar Hammerstein, and one or two other bold spirits, but it was not until the Frohman, Klaw and Erlanger Syndicate was formed that the old Strolling Player, Vagabond theatre was finally laid to rest. At this time the theatre began to be molded into the well oiled and very profitable business machine that it was for twenty-odd years, and that it could have continued to be. Unfortunately, however, these strong and ambitious men, Frohman, Hayman, Klaw and their associates, were better architects than they were house furnishers. They performed miracles in building up a really imposing structure, but after it was built they never had the slightest idea what to do with it. I have watched the rise, and later the slow decay, of these well-planned and ambitious syndicates more times than I like to think about, and I have come to the conclusion that it would have been a good thing if, in each of these groups of hard-headed businessmen, there had been at least one of them who had had a vague idea of what the theatre really ought to be.

The Klaw and Erlanger Syndicate was not the only one, although until the Shuberts came down from Syracuse their power was unchallenged; the Stair and Havlin Circuit in the popular-priced houses, the Columbia Wheel that dominated the burlesque shows, and the Keith, Albee, Orpheum vaudeville combination, all built up amazingly successful structures, and let them fall down about their ears because they knew so much more about their business detail than they knew about their shows. The big minstrel troupes and the circuses pined away for the same reason, and later the picture business was threatened by the same fate, but was saved, at least for a time, by the arrival of the talking picture and the colored film.

The war has made for us millions of new theatre-goers, their pockets full of money, but in 1897 our public was very much smaller and they had very little money to spend. At that time the arrival of “The Business Era” of the theatre had not, as yet, greatly affected the well established old line managers, who were in many ways a different breed of cats from most of the men who have succeeded them. Men like Daly, A. M. Palmer, Charles Hoyt and Edward Harrigan did more than lease a theatre and decide upon what play was to be performed there. All these men were directors as every theatrical producer ought to be. They selected a play and worked with the author on it and built it up and brought it into life. To these men every play they produced was something to love and cherish, and they produced their plays with their own money—the clamoring crowd of backers, angels, investors and suckers being as yet unborn.

The leading dramatists of that period were Bronson Howard and Augustus Thomas, Edward Harrigan, Charles Hoyt and James A. Herne, good men, all of them. Hoyt was our best farce writer and none of us has ever equaled him. Thomas was a master of sane melodrama and a man of great dignity and force. James Herne’s plays were good melodramas and in the case of a little known play of his, “Margaret Fleming,” he rose way above melodrama into what I think was the first fine naturalistic folk play ever written by an American.

Edward Harrigan had a place all his own as a dramatist until, later, George Cohan came along with the same shrewd sense of values and the same photographic sense of the characters we all of us knew and met every day along our streets. There were not so many new plays produced in those days and Charles Frohman had already started importing the plays of the best of the English dramatists.

There were, at that time, many fine actors, the greatest of them being Edwin Booth, who, to my mind, towers above any other actor I have ever seen—fully as much as Shakespeare towers over all other writers for the theatre. Joseph Jefferson was playing “Rip” and “The Rivals” and he was also a great actor. Nat Goodwin remains in my memory as one of the very best and Richard Mansfield was always well worth seeing, not in the same class as Booth or Jefferson, but a real actor of power and great vitality. Ada Rehan, Modjeska and Madam Januscheck and in some parts Fanny Davenport were the outstanding women players and Viola Allen was following in their footsteps. This was a little after the Belasco and DeMille days, and Belasco had just come back to prominence with Mrs. Leslie Carter in a rather preposterous affair called “The Heart of Maryland” and was started again on his remarkable career. Belasco was never really a dramatist, but he was a splendid director, and he belonged in the theatre and, on the whole, his influence upon it was worth while. In later years I was to know him well, but at the time of which I am now writing, our paths were far apart. I had had one play produced, although I seemed to be about the only one who knew anything about it, and having tasted blood I was eager to try it again. I wrote several rather ambitious plays and submitted them to Daly, Palmer and Charles Frohman, but as I remember it, they didn’t even get a laugh, and in desperation I tried my hand at a lurid melodrama. As this type of play was at that time very popular, I had no great trouble in placing the first one I tried my hand at. It was a rather terrifying opus called “Through the Breakers,” and that was one there never was any doubt about. It played for three seasons in the “popular-priced” theatres and was produced successfully in England, Australia and South Africa. At the time I wrote it I had only intended to write one play of this sort in the hope that it would give me money enough to exist on until I could place a more ambitious sort of thing, but it didn’t work out like that. Before I realized what had happened, I found that my thumb was so firmly caught in the machinery that it was ten years before I could get it out again.

In the meantime, the more ambitious sort of play seemed to be getting along all right, without me. Charles Kline and George Broadhurst had come into the picture and among the actors Maude Adams and Ethel Barrymore had made their start, a start that was to take them on the long and glamorous journey that is part of all our memories of the theatre. Ada Rehan was dropping out but John Drew, who had been Miss Rehan’s leading man with the Daly company, became a star under the Frohman management, and stepped gracefully from one smart but rather light-waisted polite comedy to another. Mr. Drew was a sound as well as a charming actor, and a man who, if he and Mr. Frohman had ventured, could have made a success of much more vital characters. He made a great name for himself in what he did, and he made a lot of money and hundreds of important friends, so I have no doubt he was well satisfied.

After the production of “Through the Breakers” I had no trouble at all in finding a market for as many of that type of play as I cared to write, and I plunged ahead with the wholehearted enthusiasm that has, with me, been rather a doubtful asset. I have so much fun writing and producing any kind of a play that I often wake up suddenly to find myself amazed by my own activities. I have very little critical sense about my own work, and an absurd and rather childish love of the theatre. No matter how bad the play I am working on may be, and how sure I am in my heart that it can never be anything but bad, it still seems to me to be vastly better than no play at all. This is all wrong, of course, and I have suffered from it, but I have pulled some very bad plays out of the fire and tailored them into success, which in part has atoned for some of my sins.

For a little more than ten years, the Stair and Havlin Circuit consisted of what we called “A Wheel.” Stair and Havlin owned, or controlled, thirty-five theatres, five of them in Greater New York and the others scattered about the country from Boston to Kansas City. Some of these theatres, but as a matter of fact only a very few of them, sold their tickets for ten, twenty and thirty cents, the usual prices running from fifteen cents to seventy-five cents in the orchestra and often a few seats at one dollar. The plays presented were very like the “B” picture product of Hollywood, and the greatest mistake that was made, or could be made, about that type of product was to approach its manufacture with the idea that anything, no matter how bad, was good enough. As a matter of fact, there are good “B” pictures and bad ones, and some of them are as sure of making a profit as the others are of never making a dollar. The good, or perhaps it might be safer to say, the well made, sensational melodrama was, for ten years or more, by far the most sure-fire product in which show business has ever dealt. They never made enormous money but they could always be counted on for a very substantial profit on the small amount of money they cost us to produce. They had to be put together by someone who knew how but, as a matter of fact, good writing had very little to do with it as they had to be fashioned, as the old silent pictures were, for the eye rather than for the ear, and the tailor who cut them out had to know a lot about the theatre.

Only a handful of men ever really mastered this trick. Theodore Kramer, Hal Reid, Charles A. Blaney, Lincoln Carter, Charles Taylor and I wrote most of them. I devoted over ten years to this game and in that time I ground out well over a hundred of these plays and did most of the directing of them. As I look back I wonder how I could have done it until I look about me and become aware of the flood of mystery and tough detective novels that are pouring in a steady stream off the presses, and notice the constant recurrence of the names of the most popular authors, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. I have no doubt but what the public is hungry for the stories of their favorite writers, just as our public used to be for the melodramas of a few of us who had managed to capture their fancy, but it isn’t always a wise thing to count too much on that. I went to Al Woods one day and told him a touching story of my youth. My mother often made, for her houseful of children, a very fancy sort of apple pudding. My seven sisters and brothers were all of them fond of it, but with me it became a passion. One day Mother baked an enormous one and set it out to cool beside an open window, and I stole it and devoured it to the last crumb. It was a very good example of my mother’s art, as I remember it, but from that day I have never tasted apple pudding again. Mr. Woods’ kind heart was very much touched by this tragic story and he agreed with me that since my name was freshly pasted every week on every ash barrel and garbage can in all America, we might apply the moral of my story to ourselves.

As a result of that philosophic conference, from that day on, my plays came out under the names of five different authors. These five names were all invented by Mr. Woods, as I told him I was having a tough enough time in making up the stories. In the course of time, John Oliver, one of these names, became quite as infamous as my own.

The popular-priced theatres then held the place that the twenty-five cent movies later took away from them, when they slugged their way into the picture. It was not for them as glorious a victory as it would have been had they won it from a worthy rival. Our theatres were mostly awful old dumps, dirty and gloomy and uncomfortable, the picture houses were new and clean and very well managed. The leaders of the motion picture industry, from the first, kept their eyes wide open, while we of the theatre never seem to have opened ours until, too late, we wake up and say, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t see that coming.”

On our popular-priced circuit the theatres played an attraction for only one week, with the exception of a few “three-night stands” like Rochester, Syracuse, Columbus and Indianapolis. These towns changed their play twice weekly and were booked together as one of the spokes in the wheel. It was necessary that thirty-five shows should be made ready to fill the time, and as the theatres all opened their season on the same day, usually late in August, the thirty-five companies had to be at the starting line. One great advantage of this was that a manager would be given a complete list of the towns his company was to play, and of the dates on which it was to play them. He knew just where his company was to be for its entire season of thirty-five weeks and the actors’ certainty of having a thirty-five weeks’ season made it possible for us to cast our plays with experienced and responsible players. The amount of money that could be earned at that time, either by an actor or a playwright on the popular-priced circuit or on the Broadway stage, would be scornfully laughed at today, but although many changes have taken place, one thing remains the same, even we people of the theatre have to eat. Our services, like the services of everybody else, are for sale at the highest price we can get for them.

This was years before the picture business was even dreamed about and before the ever rising flood that was pouring in from Europe crowded our cities and filled our streets with strangers, not too familiar with our language or our customs, but as eager as any of the rest of us for any possible break in the monotony of life.

Before the birth of the automobile, the radio, the motion picture and the comic strip, you had to get your fun and your romance either from the theatre or from life itself, and that isn’t always an easy thing to do. Nobody in the theatre made much money. Men like Bronson Howard and Augustus Thomas made far less than the writer of “Soap Opera” for the radio is making today and no actor’s salary, not even the salary of the greatest Frohman stars, came within a thousand miles of what is paid today to second string performers, either in Hollywood or on the radio. Since the Dramatists Guild has come into power we dramatists all get practically the same return, which is a percentage of the gross receipts which cannot be less than five percent and goes up to ten percent after the receipts get to be over a stated amount, which in my case always is seven thousand dollars, although on one or two occasions some generous, or excited, producers have paid me ten percent of the entire gross. I never sell my plays and never have turned over any of my copyrights, so that in due time all rights in them come back to me. I started out that way and I have no intention of making any change. My royalty on all the melodramas I wrote for the popular-priced theatres was always eight percent of the company’s share, and when, as frequently happened, I was offered more I refused to take it, motivated neither by modesty nor by kindness of heart, but because I knew the manager couldn’t afford to pay me any more and that the day his show started to lose money he would close it. All the money I have ever made in the theatre has been paid to me either by a Jewish or an Irish manager, and neither one of these groups is made up of gentlemen who are supposed to be very easy to get the best of; but I was born of generations of Yankee folks of Northern Maine and I have managed to get along.

I wrote sensational melodramas for a long time and finally I gave up writing them for two reasons: first, because by that time the motion picture business was well started and I knew that they would, before long, drive us out; and secondly, because the time came when it wasn’t possible for me to write this sort of play any longer. To me the most interesting discovery I have ever made is that no man can successfully write any play that is below his own standard of taste or of intelligence. The crude and sensational plays I had been turning out had been written by a young man, who was a little crude himself, and possibly even a bit sensational. A man learns a lot by living, and the contacts made by any man who is even moderately successful do, or should do, a lot to develop both his sophistication and his taste. As a matter of fact, when I wrote these old plays I must have thought they were pretty good or I never could have held an audience with them, and when I began to find myself contemptuous of an over-melodramatic situation, I found the audience refused to believe it in exact proportion to my own disbelief. Any writer who tells you he can successfully write “down” to his public is either a liar or a fool, as every audience is always honest and I never saw a composite audience foolish enough to accept any situation that wasn’t sincerely presented, no matter how mistaken that sincerity might have been.

I used to quarrel about this with Theodore Kramer, who was at first my closest rival, and he always accused me of being too ready to laugh at my own plays. This he couldn’t understand, and didn’t like at all, and when, upon occasion, I dared to laugh at one of his, it put quite a strain upon our friendship. Kramer was rather a heavy-minded German who honestly thought that all of his melodramas were dramatic masterpieces, and his play, “The Fatal Wedding,” although one could hardly label it as a masterpiece, was quite as successful, possibly a little more so, than any of my own. The thing he found it hard to forgive me for was that I kept on writing them. The last time I ever saw Mr. Kramer was in a bar one night on Fourteenth Street. It was late on a Monday night, on which I had three new plays running simultaneously in New York, one of them at the Grand Opera House, one at the Fourteenth Street Theatre and one at the old Star Theatre on Broadway. This, so Kramer informed me, was not “Kosher” and he didn’t see how he could be expected to put up with it. In spite of heroic attempts to soothe his wounded spirits with many large glasses of the heavy German beer he loved, he bid me a tearful good-bye and the next day he sailed for Germany, and never returned.

The days weren’t long enough at that time for me to do much besides my work, but I did take time enough to marry a young actress, Elizabeth Breyer, who had been playing in the company of E. H. Sothern, one of our leading actors. This was about the only wise thing I had ever done up to that moment, and very frequently since then, when I have found myself despondent and inclined to doubt my own wisdom and ability, I have remembered what good judgment I had at least once displayed and found great consolation.

The day after we were married we journeyed to Rochester, New York, where, still in search of experience, I had leased the Baker Theatre from the Shuberts, who were just starting out on their fabulous careers, and began an association that has lasted, off and on, for forty-five years.

In Rochester I was not only the proprietor and the manager of the Owen Davis Stock Company, but I was also the theatre manager, press agent, stage director, and I often filled in as an assistant treasurer and sold tickets in the box office. This would seem, as I look back, quite enough for one man to take care of, but as a matter of fact, I fell into the habit, when business started to fall off, of writing our next week’s play to save paying any less energetic playwright a royalty. My wife was a member of the company and a very popular one and we had a lot of fun. Our twenty weeks’ engagement was so successful that I devoted the next few summers to the same sort of thing and, in association with the Shuberts, we had stock companies in Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

When we returned to New York in the Fall of 1902, I signed a contract to write a melodrama for Sullivan, Harris and Woods, who were then the outstanding producers on the Stair and Havlin Circuit. Sullivan, never very active in the firm, was related to “Big Tim Sullivan” who I rather think had some interest in the business. Big Tim Sullivan was a big man in New York, he had great political power and was a man of very winning personality. I got to know him very well and never ceased to wonder at him. He was a good friend or a bad enemy, which usually depended on whether or not you voted right. Those really were the “good old days” and following “Big Tim Sullivan” about town I saw plenty of things that would make good stories, but they would have little or nothing to do with the theatre. Sam Harris, then really the head of the Sullivan, Harris and Woods firm, has always been, in my mind, one of the finest men I have ever known in show business, and I had a close association with him until his death, and have missed him ever since then. He was a fair man as well as a very able one. Al Woods, the other member of the firm, was then, and is now, a man of very remarkable personality, a great showman who climbed up from his beginning on the “East Side” to be one of the great theatrical figures of his day.

The firm of Sullivan, Harris and Woods split up soon after I started to work with them and as Theodore Kramer and I were writing all their plays it was decided that Kramer was to remain with Sam Harris and that I was to work with Al Woods. This decision, on my part at least, was influenced by the terms of a very remarkable contract Mr. Woods offered me. By that contract I was to write and Woods was to produce at least four new melodramas each year for five years, and at the same time he was to see that no less than four of my previously written plays should be running. That assured me the Stair and Havlin thirty-five weeks’ season for at least eight plays of mine which added up to a guarantee of two hundred and eighty weeks’ royalty each season. We kept that contract faithfully. As a matter of fact, Woods produced fifty-two plays of mine. Of all of these plays I think that only one of them lost money, and that one for rather an amusing reason. Woods and I, probably a trifle puffed up by our successes, made up our minds that it was our duty to do something to raise the standard of the popular-priced theatre, and to show to our public what a real drama ought to be. Woods’ orders to me were to give it everything I had, and I did. To be absolutely truthful about it I gave it a little more, and the result was a very dismal failure. Mr. Woods and I comforted ourselves by saying, “The damned fools didn’t know enough to appreciate it,” but I rather think that the “damned fools” knew a bit more than Woods and I did.

The first two plays I produced with Mr. Woods were among the best of the melodramas that were done in those days. “The Confessions of a Wife” and “The Gambler of the West” were really better than their titles would indicate them to be. I think that “The Gambler of the West” was one of the soundest plays I have written and by far the best of the sensational melodramas of the time. I followed these with “Chinatown Charlie” and “Convict 999,” both of them being exactly what the doctor ordered. The next one was the famous “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model,” and need I say any more? “Nellie” was really a big show, with twenty-one scenes and a very large company; its business was sensational and both Mr. Woods and I were very proud of it, although the time came when it hung very heavily about my neck. Nowadays I am in receipt of many offers for its revival or for its inclusion in some publication of famous melodramas. Many inquiries have come from directors of “Little Theatres” who obviously want to put it under a microscope, much as I used to putter about in the laboratory with some relic of past civilization in one of my courses in paleontology. My answer to all these requests is that by some tragic accident the last existing copy of “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model” was destroyed in a horrible fire in which there was great loss of life. I am a man who treasures the truth too highly to waste it upon the undeserving. Nobody is ever going to see “Nellie” again—I got away with it once and I see no reason in tempting providence. As a matter of fact, I don’t allow any of the old melodramas to be played any more; the audiences of today couldn’t enjoy them, the actors of today couldn’t play them, and the stage directors of today would have no idea at all of how to put them on. Then, too, bloodthirsty as they are, I don’t want to see the plays themselves murdered. And, granting that I wrote them with perhaps a little more sense of humor, and a little clearer realization of their exaggerated sentimentality and their artificially calculated thrills than my brother playwrights who wrote this type of play, the fact remains that I did not write them for a joke. They were very serious to me. The hundred and twenty-nine of these plays, of which I now have manuscripts, or to which I can find some reference in old scrap books, cost me ten years’ work—years in which I worked from ten to twenty hours a day. I wrote them all in long-hand. At a guess, but a very conservative one, they total just about two million words.

Young people, when they are tough enough, don’t need much sleep. Before Mrs. Davis and I were married and for twenty years after that, in her company, I saw practically every play that was produced in America and always, in the hasty trips we made to Europe, we tried to see all of the best of the plays being presented there. For some years my wife played in one of the plays, and in the summer stock companies I managed, but after the birth of our older son she gave it up, reluctantly I am afraid, but she found herself fully occupied trying to look out for me and for the two boys, who soon rounded out our family. Good years, those first ten years, and they set me a pattern that has altered very little in the forty years since then.