In Norfolk, Va., a Centennial was to be held in celebration of the landing on Southern soil of the first of the F. F. V.’s, and a play commemorating the event had been written around Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. Mr. Griffith accepted a part in it. The six weeks’ engagement would help out until the rehearsals of his own play were called. But Pocahontas’s financial aid must have been somewhat stingy according to the letter my husband wrote me in New York. We had felt we couldn’t afford my railroad fare to Norfolk and my maintenance there. It was our first separation.
And this the letter:
Dear Linda,
I am sending you a little $3 for carfare. I would send more but I couldn’t get anything advanced, so I only send you this much. I’ll get my salary, or part of it, rather, Monday, so I’ll send you more then and also tell you what I think we should do. I would like to go to Miss —— if we could get it for $6 a week, or $25 a month but I don’t like to pay $7.50, that’s too strong if we can do cheaper. Of course, if we can’t we can’t and that’s all there is to it. Let me know as soon as you get this money as I am only sending it wrapped up as I don’t want you to have to cash so small a check as $3, so that’s why I am sending it this way.
I bet you I get some good things out of this world for her yet, just watch me and see....
Her husband,
David
Pocahontas flivvered out in three weeks. But as Shakespeare says, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” While Mr. Griffith was away, I found time to make myself a new dress. In a reckless moment I had paid a dollar deposit on some green silk dress material at Macy’s, which at a later and wealthier moment I had redeemed. So now I rented a sewing machine and sewed like mad to get the dress done, for I could afford only one dollar-and-a-half weekly rental on the old Wheeler and Wilson.
By the time “A Fool and A Girl” was to open in Washington, D. C., there was just enough cold cash left for railroad fare there. Klaw and Erlanger produced the play under Mr. Duane’s direction, and Mr. Hackett came on to rehearsals in Washington. Fannie Ward and Jack Deane played the leading parts. Here they met and their romance began, and according to latest accounts it is still thriving. Alison Skipworth of “The Torch Bearers” and other successes, was a member of the cast.
The notices were not the best nor the worst. They are interesting to-day, for they show how time has ambled apace since October, 1907. Said Hector Fuller, the critic:
It may be said that the dramatist wanted to show where his hero’s feet strayed; and where he found the girl he was afterwards to make his wife, but if one wants to tell the old, old and beautiful story of redemption of either man or woman through love, it is not necessary to portray the gutters from which they are redeemed....