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.
"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.