Charles Frohman: Manager and Man Part 46

"It is sixty miles away," I ventured to suggest.

"Well," he remarked, "I'll climb it some day. As John Russell plastered the Rocky Mountains with 'The City Directory,' so I'll hang a s.h.i.+ngle from the top of Mont Blanc: 'Ambition: a comedy in four acts by Charles Frohman.'" And as we went home to Ouchy he told me the secret desire of his heart.

He wanted to write a play.

"Isn't it enough to be a theatrical manager?" I asked.

"No," said he, "a theatrical manager is a joke. The public thinks he spends his days in writing checks and his nights in counting the receipts. Why, when I wanted to become a depositor at the Union Bank in London, the cas.h.i.+er asked me my profession. 'Theatrical manager,' I replied. 'Humph!' said the cas.h.i.+er, taken aback. 'Well, never mind, Mr.

Frohman; we'll put you down as 'a gentleman.'"

"But is a playwright," I asked, "more highly reputed than a theatrical manager?"

"Not in America," said Frohman. "Most Americans think that the actors and actresses write their own parts. I was on the Long Branch boat the other day and met a well-known Empire first-nighter. 'What are you going to give us next season, Frohman?' he said.

"'I open with a little thing by Sardou,' I replied.

"'Sardou!' he cried. 'Who in thunder is Sardou?'

"All the same," Frohman continued, "I mean to be a playwright. Didn't Lester Wallack write 'Rosedale' and 'The Veteran'? Didn't Augustin Daly make splendid adaptations of German farces? Doesn't Belasco turn out first-cla.s.s dramas? Then why not I? I mean to learn the game. Don't give me away, but watch my progress in play-making as we jog along through life."

He got his first tip from Pinero. "When I have sketched out a play,"

observed the author of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," "I go and live among the characters."

Frohman had no characters of his own, but he held in his brain a fabulous store of other people's plays. And whenever they had a historical or a literary origin he ran these origins to their lair. At Ferney, on the Lake of Geneva, he cared nothing about Voltaire; he wanted to see the place where the free-thinkers gathered in A. M.

Palmer's production of "Daniel Rochat." At Geneva he was not concerned with Calvin, but with memories of a Union Square melodrama, "The Geneva Cross." At Lyons he expected the ghosts of _Claude Melnotte_ and _Pauline_ to meet him at the station. In Paris he allowed Napoleon to slumber unnoticed in the Invalides while he hunted the Faubourg Saint-Antoine for traces of "The Tale of Two Cities," and the Place de la Concorde for the site of the guillotine on which _Sidney Carton_ died, and the Latin Quarter haunts of _Mimi_ and _Musette_, and the Bal Bullier where _Trilby_ danced, and the Concert des Amba.s.sadeurs where _Zaza_ bade her lover good-by.

Any production was an excuse for these expeditions. Sir Herbert Tree had staged "Colonel Newcome"; we had ourselves plotted a dramatization of "Pendennis"; Mrs. Fiske had given "Vanity Fair"; so off we went, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, searching for the place, duly placarded, where Thackeray lunched in the days of the "Paris Sketch-book" and the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse."

In the towns of Kent we got on the trail of d.i.c.kens with the enthusiasm of a Hopkinson Smith; in London, between Drury Lane and Wardour Street, we hunted for the Old Curiosity Shop; in Yarmouth we discovered the place where Peggotty's boat-hut might have lain on the sands. With William Seymour, who knew every street from his study of "The Rivals,"

we listened to the abbey bells of Bath. And when "Romeo and Juliet" was to be revived with Sothern and Marlowe, Frohman even proposed that we should visit Verona. He only abandoned the idea on discovering that the Veronese had no long-distance telephones, and that, while wandering among the tombs of the Montagus and Capulets, he would be cut off from his London office.

Having thus steeped himself in the atmosphere of his work, he set forth to learn the rules of the game. I met him in Paris on his return from New York. "How go the rules?" I asked.

"Rotten," said he. "Our American playwrights say there are no rules; with them it is all inspiration. The Englishmen say that rules exist, but what the rules are they either don't know or won't tell."

We went to the Concert Rouge. Those were the happy days when there were no frills; when the price of admission was charged with what you drank; when Saint-Saens accompanied his "Samson and Delilah" with an imaginary flute obligato on a walking-stick; when Ma.s.senet, with his librettist, Henri Cain, dozed quietly through the meditation of "Thas"; when the students and their girls forgot frivolity under the spell of "L'Arlesienne."

In a smoky corner sat a group of well-known French playwrights, headed by G. A. Caillavet, afterward famous as author of "Le Roi." They were indulging in a heated but whispered discussion. They welcomed Frohman cordially, then returned to the debate.

"What are they talking about?" asked Frohman.

"The rules of the drama," said I.

"Then there are rules!" cried the manager, eagerly.

"Ask Caillavet," said I.

"Rules?" exclaimed Caillavet, who spoke English. "Are there rules of painting, sculpture, music? Why, the drama is a ma.s.s of rules! It is nothing but rules."

"And how long," faltered Frohman, thinking of his play--"how long would it take to learn them?"

"A lifetime at the very least," answered Caillavet. Disconsolate, Frohman led me out into the Rue de Tournon. Heartbroken, he convoyed me into Foyot's, and drowned his sorrows in a grenadine.

From that hour he was a changed man. He apparently put aside all thought of the drama whose name was to be stenciled on the summit of Mont Blanc; yet, nevertheless, he applied himself a.s.siduously to learning the principles on which the theater was based.

Another winter had pa.s.sed before we sat side by side on the terrace of the Cafe Napolitain.

"I have asked Harry Pett.i.tt, the London melodramatist," Frohman said, "to write me a play. 'I warn you, Frohman,' he replied, 'that I have only one theme--the Persecuted Woman.' Dion Boucicault, who was present, said, 'Add the Persecuted Girl.' Joseph Jefferson was with us, and Jefferson remarked, 'Add the Persecuted Man.' So was Henry Irving, who said: 'Pity is the trump card; but be Aristotelian, my boy; throw in a little Terror; with Pity I can generally go through a season, as with 'Charles the First' or 'Olivia'; with Terror and Pity combined I am liable to have something that will outlast my life." And Irving mentioned "The Bells" and "The Lyons Mail."

"But who will write you your Terror and Pity?" I asked Frohman.

"If Terror means 'thrill,'" said Frohman, "I can count on Belasco and Gillette. If Pity means 'sympathy,' the Englishmen do it pretty well. So does Fitch. So do the French, who used to be masters of the game."

"You don't expect," I said, "to pick up another 'Two Orphans,' a second 'Ticket of Leave Man'?"

"I'm not such a fool," said Frohman. "But I've got hold of something now that will help me to feed my stock company in New York." And off we went with Dillingham to see "The Girl from Maxim's" at the Nouveautes.

When we got home to the Ritz Frohman discussed the play after his manner: "Do you know," he said, "I find the element of pity quite as strongly developed in these French farces as in the Ambigu melodramas.

The truant husband leaves home, goes out for a good time, gets buffeted and bastinadoed for his pains, and when the compa.s.sionate audience says, 'He has had enough; let up,' he comes humbly home to the bosom of his family and is forgiven. Where can you find a more human theme than that?"

"Then you hold," said I, "that even in a French farce the events should be reasonable?"

"I wouldn't buy one," he replied, "if I didn't consider its basis thoroughly human. Dion Boucicault told me long ago that farce, like tragedy, must be founded on granite. 'Farce, well done,' said he, 'is the most difficult form of dramatic composition. That is why, if successful, it is far the most remunerative.'"

Years went by. The stock company was dead. "Charles Frohman's Comedians"

had disappeared. The "stars" had supplanted them. Frohman was at the zenith of his career. American papers called him "the Napoleon of the Drama." Prime Ministers courted him in the grill-room of the London Savoy. The Paris _Figaro_ announced the coming of "the celebrated impresario." I heard him call my name in the crowd at the Gare du Nord and we bundled into a cab.

"So you're a great man now," I said.

"Am I?" he remarked. "There's one thing you can bet on. If they put me on a throne to-day they are liable to yank me off to-morrow."

"And how's your own play getting along?"

"Don't!" he winced. "Let us go to the Snail."

In the cozy recesses of the Escargot d'Or, near the Central Markets, he unraveled the mysteries of the "star system" which had made him famous.

"It's the opposite of all we ever believed," he said, while the mussels and sh.e.l.l-fish were being heaped up before him. "Good-by to Caillavet and his rules. Good-by, Terror and Pity. Good-by, dear French farce.

Give me a pretty girl with a smile, an actor with charm, and I will defy our old friend Aristotle."

"Is it as easy as that?" I asked, in amazement.

"No," said he, "it's confoundedly difficult to find the girl with the smile and the actor with charm. It is pure accident. There are players of international reputation who can't draw a dollar. There are chits of chorus-girls who can play a night of sixteen hundred dollars in Youngstown, Ohio."

"And the play doesn't matter?" I inquired.

"There you've got me," said Frohman, as the crepes Suzette arrived in their chafing-dish. "My interest makes me pretend that the play's the thing. I congratulate foreign authors on a week of fourteen thousand dollars in Chicago, and they go away delighted. But I know, all the time, that of this sum the star drew thirteen thousand nine hundred dollars, and the author the rest."

"To what do you attribute such a state of affairs?"