Details are apt to escape one’s mind after twenty-five years, but I have some hazy recollection of having been rather up against it there in Rochester. My books, however, prove that I opened the season with THE FATAL CALL—loss five hundred and two dollars—and followed with THE TWO ORPHANS—loss three hundred and six dollars. I can’t help wishing those books of mine told me how I did it.
One memory, however, is very clear. The play for the third week arrived from the play brokers, C.O.D., two hundred dollars, and lay in the express office as safe from me as it is ever possible for any play to be. I was quite at the end of my string and had no possible avenue of escape. That day, after the matinée of THE TWO ORPHANS, I said a polite good day to the deputy sheriff who seemed to have taken a great fancy to my private chair in the theater’s box office and started walking the streets trying to think of some possible means of keeping my company together. In my walk I passed a second hand book store and my eye caught the title of a ragged old volume in the tray marked “ten cents”—UNDER TWO FLAGS. This cross marks the spot where I started a trick of high pressure play writing, a trick which of course I put sternly behind me long years ago, although I have never been able to convince many people of my reformation. In any case Owen Davis’ Baker Theatre Stock Company opened five days later in a dramatization of UNDER TWO FLAGS and played for four weeks—profit $10,250 (by the book).
For four years I ran this company in Rochester every summer and during that time, in partnership with the Shuberts, took over houses in Syracuse, Utica, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. They were busy years. In Rochester I was company manager, stage director, press agent, head box-office boy and whenever business got bad I’d write the next week’s play to save paying for one.
During all this time Mrs. Davis was a member of the company and adored by the Rochester audiences. She might have had a brilliant career in the theater if she had chosen to stick to it instead of devoting her life to “her men” as she has always called us, “her men” being myself and our sons, Donald and Owen, Jr. For a long time I am afraid she found it very hard to give up the work she loved but I am sure she is well rewarded for her sacrifice now in the excitement and joy of seeing these two boys climbing so sturdily ahead on the path she knows so well—an unusual experience for a mother—not only to have hope and faith in her sons but to know exactly what each step they take means and where they are going.
During the following five years we divided our time between these stock companies in the summer and New York in the winter. In those five years I wrote thirty-eight melodramas, two farces, a number of vaudeville acts and burlesque pieces and one big show for the Hippodrome, as well as picking up any other little job that came to hand.
It was during this time I wrote my first play for Sam Harris, then a member of the firm of Sullivan, Harris and Woods, and started a friendship that has lasted ever since. A little later Al Woods sent for me and told me he was leaving the firm and was about to set up for himself. Our interview ended in the drawing of the most remarkable contract ever made between a manager and an author. By its terms Woods was to produce not less than four new plays, and after the first year, four old ones each season for five years. During that time I could not write for any other manager and he could not produce a play written by any other author. During the five years Mr. Woods produced fifty odd plays of mine but we both of us cheated shamefully on the other part of our agreement. We produced a number of plays by the late Theodore Kramer and I sneaked a few over with other popular-priced managers of the day.
Woods was, and is, a remarkable man, a great showman and a man of humorous and philosophic nature. His outstanding characteristic is, to me, that if he loves a play he knows how to produce it. If he tries to do a play he doesn’t love he knows nothing about it and cares less. He has but two opinions of a play when he reads it, “Swell” or “It don’t appeal to me,” and when he plays his hunch he’s very apt to succeed. This instinctive feel for values is one of the greatest assets in the equipment of the theatrical manager and Al Woods and William A. Brady have more of it than any other men of my time. It is a pure instinct, quite apart from any critical faculty and is emotional rather than the result of any reasoning.
David Belasco, a great showman, always seemed to me to see in a play manuscript the thing it would develop into under his guidance, but Woods and Brady sense an audience’s response to certain sorts of melodramatic situations and when they play their instinct and not their judgment they usually are right.
The first play under my contract with Woods was THE CONFESSIONS OF A WIFE, which really wasn’t nearly so dreadful as it sounds. The second was THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST, probably the best popular-priced melodrama produced during these years. Then came CONVICT 999, CHINATOWN CHARLIE and the famous NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL.
During my time with Al Woods, one of our most unusual experiences was with a melodrama called THE MARKED WOMAN and only a day or two ago, when I dropped into Mr. Woods’ office for a friendly chat, Martin Herman, Mr. Woods’ brother and general manager, gravely brought us in a contract, yellow with age, to remind us of an absurd but to us at the time a perfectly normal activity. In those days everything was fish that came to our net. If a particularly horrible murder excited the public, we had it dramatized and on the stage usually before any one knew who had been guilty of the crime. Frequently I have had a job of hasty re-writing when it became evident that my chosen culprit from real life was an innocent and perfectly respectable citizen.