Had I known as much in those days as I now know of the enormous difficulties ahead of me it is possible that I might have feared them, but at the time my confidence was more developed than my prudence and I had no fear at all. This is, of course, the usual attitude of youth. The obstacles ahead that seem like mountains to the experience of middle age are only mole hills to a young man of twenty odd who quite expects to leap over them without a change of stride.
Yet I doubt if any undertaking in the world is any more difficult than that of one who elects to make a living as a dramatist. He must win his place and then he must hold it, and of the two the last is really the most difficult. The late Charles Kline told me just before his death that the most pitiful thing in the world was a playwright who had written a big success and learned enough of the difficulties of doing it to feel absolutely convinced that there wasn’t the slightest chance of his ever being able to do it again. Every young playwright must put up with a number of things that cut deep into a sensitive nature and leave scars that never quite die away. Many men and women of talent, who might have developed into fine writers for the theater find themselves too sensitive for the harsh contacts and give up in despair. The hours of waiting in managers’ offices, ignored and unwelcome, the contemptuous acceptance of plays to be read that are ultimately glanced over by an office boy and scornfully rejected, are all a part of the game.
I took one of my first plays to the Frohman office. What happened to it there was, or at least I thought it was, a matter of life or death to me. I had no money at all and during the five weeks I was waiting for a verdict I sold what few clothes I had left, piece by piece, to pay my three dollars a week room rent and spent thirty cents a day for food. At last I was ushered into the presence of the play reader, later one of the great men of the theater, who met me with this encouraging speech: “You are,” he said, “a strong and husky young man, with, so I have heard, some reputation as an athlete. Why don’t you take this play of yours and see how far you can throw it?” This was hardly a tactful rejection, and as it turned out rather a silly one, as the play in question some years later made a very reasonable success.
One must be prepared for this sort of thing and resolute enough to thrive on it, as success very rarely comes upon a young playwright very suddenly. It doesn’t sneak up behind one and thrust fame and fortune into one’s lap, fame and fortune being very timid birds, more likely to fall into the lap of the one who goes out after them with a gun than to the dreamer who sits at home and waits patiently. In my experience patient waiting never got anybody anything. All the prizes worth having are for the daring—the one who sits and waits never got anything—except fat.
A dramatist isn’t a dramatist at all until he has had a play produced, no matter how many plays he may have written, and he must get that first production at any cost. It is natural enough that the managers should hesitate before purchasing the play of an untried writer, especially as there are only a few of them who themselves know enough about a play to have any real confidence in their own reaction. The successful author, of course, has a great advantage, and a man with one or two hits to his credit can get a pretty bad play accepted. Yet Mr. Shaw’s observation that “If it’s by a good writer it’s a good play” doesn’t mean quite as much as it used to, since the critic of late has developed a rather alarming habit of eagerly leaping at the throat of the man who is obviously trading on an established reputation and trying to get away with careless and sloppy work.
In some ways it is, I think, more difficult for a beginner to-day than it was in my youth. In those days almost any play that got itself produced made some money for its author and any honest writer of long experience would own up to considerable sums made from plays that cost their producers a lot of money. To-day, however, plays die quickly and a failure means that the writer gets little, if anything, more than the trifling sum of his advance, which is seldom over five hundred and almost never, in America, over one thousand dollars. The pleasant old custom of a manager keeping a young writer’s bad plays running long enough for the writer to live comfortably until he learned how to write a better one has passed along with the other nice old romantic notions and to-day he has to hit it the first time or walk the plank.
CHARLES FROHMAN
“I took one of my first plays to the Frohman office.”
(From a caricature in the Messmore Kendall Collection)
It is, naturally enough, about as difficult for the beginner to learn how to write without any real chance of slowly and gradually learning his business as it is for the young actor of to-day to learn how to act without any real experience in acting; he lacks the training of the good stock companies of twenty years ago, or of the classic drama where he had to play many small parts before he was ever trusted with a big one. He is asked now to play any part he can look, and is given leading parts to play and fails in them more from lack of experience than from lack of talent. This doesn’t in the least mean that I think the acting of twenty-five years ago was better than the acting of to-day, because I know better. The lack of the training of the old days is unfortunate, but the change in method more than makes up for it, and although at present we have few great actors we have a tremendous supply of very competent ones. Although at this writing too many of them are in Hollywood, we can still find a good cast far more easily than we can find a good play, and there are still far too many promising young actors unable to get a chance to prove their worth. But their problem is simple compared to the problem of the young playwright, now or twenty years ago.
