Charles Frohman: Manager and Man

by Isaac Frederick Marcosson; Daniel Frohman

The last tribute to Charles Frohman was the most remarkable demonstration of sorrow in the history of the theater. The one-time barefoot boy of Sandusky, Ohio, who had projected so many people into eminence and who had himself hidden behind the rampart of his own activities, was widely mourned.

The principal funeral services were held at the Temple Emanu-El in New York. Here gathered a notable assemblage that took reverent toll of all callings and creeds. It was proud to do honor to the man who had achieved so much and who had died so heroically.

At the bier Augustus Thomas delivered an eloquent address that fittingly summed up the life and purpose of the greatest force that the English-speaking theater has yet known. Among other things he said:

"A wise man counseled, 'Look into your heart and write': 'C. F.' looked into his heart and listened. He had that quoted quality of genius that made him believe his own thought, made him know that what was true for him in his private heart was true for all mankind. That was the secret of his power. It was the golden key to both his understanding and expression.

"He was a fettered and a prisoned poet, often in his finest moments inarticulate. Working in the theater with his companies and stars, with the women and the men who knew and loved him, he accomplished less by word than by a radiating vital force that brought them into his intensity of feeling. In his social intercourse and comradeship, telling a dramatic or a comic story, at a certain pressure of its progress where other men depend on paragraphs and phrases he coined a near-word and a sign, and by a graphic and exalted pantomime ambushed and captured our emotions.

"His mind was clear and tranquil as a mountain lake, its quiet depths reflecting all the varied beauty of the bending skies. He had the gift of epitome. The men who knew him best valued his estimate, not only of the things in his own profession, but of any notable event or deed or tendency. Often his spontaneous comment on a cabled utterance or act laid stress upon the word or moment that next day served as captions for the significant review. The printed thought of the leading statesman, the outlook of the financier, the decision of the commanding soldier, or the vision of the poet found kinship in his sympathy, not because he strove tiptoe to apprehend its elevation, but because his spirit was native to that plane."

Coincident with the New York funeral, services were held at Los Angeles at the instigation of Maude Adams; at San Francisco under the sponsorship of John Drew; at Tacoma at the behest of Billie Burke; at Providence under the direction of Julia Sanderson, Donald Brian, and Joseph Cawthorn. Thus a nation-wide chain of grief linked the stars of the Frohman heaven.

Nor did foreign lands fail to render homage to the memory of Charles Frohman. A memorial was held at St.-Martins-in-the-Fields, in London, almost within stone's-throw of the Duke of York's Theater, in which he took so much pride. In the presence of a distinguished company that included the chivalry and flower of the British theater, the sub-deacon of St. Paul's conducted services for the self-made American who had risen from advance-agent to be the theatrical master of his times.

In Paris the French Society of Authors eulogized the man who had been their sympathetic envoy and sincere sponsor at the throne of American appreciation.

Thus fell the curtain on Charles Frohman. As in life he had joined two continents by the bonds of his daring and courageous enterprise, so on his death did those two worlds unite to do him honor. He had not lived in vain.