This production cost the youthful manager ten thousand dollars.
Frohman still had control of "time" at the Standard, so he now put on a play, translated by Henri Rochefort, called "A Daughter of Ireland," in which Georgia Cayvan had the title rôle. Here he scored another failure, but his ardor remained undampened and he went on to what looked at that moment to be the biggest thing he had yet tried.
Dion Boucicault was one of the great stage figures of his period. He was both actor and author, and wrote or adapted several hundred plays, including such phenomenal successes as "Colleen Bawn," "Shaughraun," which ran for a year simultaneously in London, New York, and Melbourne, and "London Assurance." There was much talk of his latest comedy, "The Jilt." Frohman, who always wanted to be associated with big names, now arranged by cable to produce this play at the Standard. Once more he plunged on an expensive company which included, among others, Fritz Williams, Louise Thorndyke, and Helen Bancroft.
For four weeks he cleared a thousand a week. Then he put the company on the road, where it did absolutely nothing. Charles, who had an uncanny sense of analysis of play failures, now declared that the reason for the failure was that theater-goers resented Boucicault's treatment of his first wife, Agnes Robertson. Boucicault had declared that he was not the father of her child, and when she sued him in England the courts gave her the verdict. Meanwhile Boucicault married, and in the eyes of the world he was a bigamist. This experience, it is interesting to add, taught Charles Frohman never to engage stars on whom there was the slightest smirch of scandal or disrepute.
At Montreal Boucicault refused to continue the tour, and this engagement, like so many of its predecessors, left Charles in a financial hole. Despite all these reverses he was able to make a livelihood out of the booking end of the office, which thrived and grew with each month. Nor was he without his sense of humor in those days.
One day he met a certain manager who had lost a great deal of money in comic opera. Frohman said to him that he heard that there was much money in the comic-opera end of the business.
"So there is," replied the manager.
"You ought to know," responded Frohman, "for you have put enough into it."
This remark, often attributed to others, is said to have originated here.
Frohman was now an established producer, and although the tide of fortune had not gone altogether happily with him, he had a Micawber-like conviction that the big thing would eventually turn up. Now came his first contact with Bronson Howard, who, a few years later, was to be the first mile-stone in his journey to fame and fortune.