Frohman and Randall made a good team, and they soon acquired a chain of more than three hundred theaters, ranging from music-halls in small towns that booked the ten-twenty-thirty-cent dramas up to the palatial houses like Hooley's in Chicago, the Hollis in Boston, and the Baldwin in San Francisco.
It was a happy-go-lucky time. If Frohman had ten dollars in his pocket to spare he considered himself rich. Money then, as always, meant very little to him. It came and went easily.
While the booking business waxed in volume the production end of the establishment did not fare so well. Charles had this activity of the office as his particular domain, and with the instinct of the plunger now began to put on plays right and left.
Just before the association with Randall, Frohman had become manager of Neil Burgess, the actor, and had booked him for a tour in a play called "Vim." A disagreement followed, and Frohman turned him over to George W. Lederer, who took the play out to the coast.
A year after this episode came the first of the many opportunities for fortune that Charles Frohman turned down in the course of his eventful life. This is the way it happened:
Burgess, who was quite an inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it called "The County Fair."
Burgess, who liked Frohman immensely, tried to get him to take charge of this piece, but Frohman would not listen to the proposition about the mechanical device. He was unhappy over his experience about "Vim," and whenever Burgess tried to talk "The County Fair" and its machine Frohman would put him off.
Burgess finally went elsewhere, and, as most people know, "The County Fair" almost rivaled "The Old Homestead" in money-making ability. The horse-racing scene became the most-talked-of episode on the stage at the time, and Burgess cleared more than a quarter of a million dollars out of the enterprise. Charles Frohman afterward admitted that his prejudice against Burgess and his machine had cost his office at least one hundred thousand dollars.
Frohman and Randall now launched an important venture. McKee Rankin, who was one of the best-known players of the time, induced them to become his managers in a piece called "The Golden Giant," by Clay M. Greene. Charles, however, agreed to the proposition on the condition that Rankin would put his wife, Kitty Blanchard, in the cast. They had been estranged, and Frohman, with his natural shrewdness, believed that the stage reunion of Mr. and Mrs. McKee Rankin would be a great drawing-card for the play. Rankin made the arrangements, and the Fifth Avenue Theater was booked for two weeks, commencing Easter Monday, 1886.
The theater was then under the management of John Stetson, of Boston, and both Frohman and Rankin looked forward to doing a great business. In this cast Robert Hilliard, who had been a clever amateur actor in Brooklyn, made his first professional appearance. Charles supervised the rehearsals and had rosy visions of a big success. At four o'clock, however, on the afternoon of the opening night, Charles went to the box-office and discovered the advance sale had been only one hundred dollars.