"My work is to produce plays that succeed, so that I can produce plays that will not succeed. That is why I must have money.
"What I would really like to do is to produce a wonderful something to which I would only go myself. My pleasure would be in seeing a remarkable performance that nobody else could see. But I can't do that. The next best thing is to produce something for the few critical people. That is what I'm trying for. I have to work through the commercial—it is the white heat through which the artistic in me has to come." It was his answer to the oft-made charge of "commercialism."
No one, perhaps, has summed up this money attitude of Frohman's better than George Bernard Shaw, who said of him:
"There is a prevalent impression that Charles Frohman is a hard-headed American man of business who would not look at anything that is not likely to pay. On the contrary, he is the most wildly romantic and adventurous man of my acquaintance. As Charles XII. became an excellent soldier because of his passion for putting himself in the way of being killed, so Charles Frohman became a famous manager through his passion for putting himself in the way of being ruined."
In many respects Frohman's feeling about money was almost childlike. He left all financial details to his subordinates. All he wanted to do was to produce plays and be let alone. Yet he had an infinite respect for the man to whom he had to pay a large sum. He felt that the actor or author who could command it was invested with peculiar significance. Upon himself he spent little. He once said:
"All I want is a good meal, a good cigar, good clothes, a good bed to sleep in, and freedom to produce whatever plays I like."
He was a magnificent loser. Failure never disturbed him. When he saw that a piece was doomed he indulged in no obituary talk. "Let's go to the next," he said, and on he went.
He lost in the same princely way that he spent. The case of "Thermidor" will illustrate. He spent not less than thirty thousand dollars on this production. Yet the moment the curtain went down he realized it was a failure. He stood at one side of the wings and Miss Marbury, who had induced him to put the play on, was at the other. With the fall of the curtain Frohman moved smilingly among his actors with no trace of disappointment on his face. But when he met Miss Marbury on the other side of the stage he said:
"Well, I suppose we have got a magnificent frost. We'll just write this off and forget it."
Frohman played with the theater as if it were a huge game. Like life itself, it was a great adventure. In the parlance of Wall Street, he was a "bull," for he was always raising salaries and royalties. Somebody once said of him: