I'd Like to Do It Again

by Owen Davis

I went into the Woods office one day about twenty-five years ago and noticed a well-dressed and well-mannered young Chinaman patiently seated in a chair in the waiting room. I asked Martin Herman what he wanted and Martin replied that he was crazy and that Al couldn’t be bothered with him. Later in the day, however, Oriental patience conquered and as a result I was called into conference with Mr. Woods and this well-mannered Chinaman.

With some difficulty Woods and I were made to understand that our friend from the Orient was the custodian of a very large sum of real money which he wanted to devote to the cause of the Liberal Party in China. These were the days of the old Empress and the Republican Party was just beginning to be heard from. Part of their activity was to arouse in America an antagonism toward the late Empress Dowager and I was asked to write and Mr. Woods to produce a play in which the poor old lady would be shown up as a sort of composite picture of all the evil characters of history. Woods and I had never met any Empresses at the time—although at this writing I understand Mr. Woods is in the habit of hobnobbing with all the crowned heads of Europe—but as there was no doubt at all of the money being both real and plentiful we swallowed our scruples, if we had any, and what I did to the old Empress of China I shudder to recall.

When I finished the play and took it to Woods, he said it was a whale, although I myself had some doubts of its merit. Our Chinese angel, by now reënforced by a committee of his fellow countrymen, said it was without doubt a mighty drama and their only suggestion was that they would like to see a scene put in where the Empress poisoned a child. I sternly refused to surrender the integrity of my script, although I made some small concessions in the nature of arson and murder and THE MARKED WOMAN was ready for production.

The popular-priced circuit never had seen such a lavish display—please remember that all bills were paid by the Republican Party of China—costumes had been sent us from Pekin, the duty alone on which was many times more than any play had ever cost us. To this day my wife has several gorgeous Chinese robes, her only graft in all these years.

THE MARKED WOMAN, to my surprise, was a great success from the first, although Edward E. Rose, who staged it, and I were not quite satisfied with the last act and determined to improve it. About three weeks after the opening, Mr. Rose and I jumped out to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the company was playing, and watched a matinée performance. As soon as the final curtain fell we rushed back stage and called the company for rehearsal. I seated myself at a table with a pad of paper and threw the sheets at Ed Rose as I filled them while he forced the lines into the poor actors’ heads and re-grouped and re-staged the scenes. The result was that we played that night, only three hours later, the last act for our second act and the second act for our last. This was, I am confident, about as complete a job of revision as was ever accomplished between a matinée and a night.

All went well with THE MARKED WOMAN for some time but one day our Chinese backers called on Mr. Woods and told him that the play must close at once. Mr. Woods, who had a hit on his hands, smiled pleasantly and asked the reason and was told that the most powerful of the Chinese Tongs had threatened to kill our friends if the play was performed after one more week. Mr. Woods expressed great sympathy but said he was sorry but his duty to me, the author, prevented him from doing as they requested. The next day the gentlemen returned to say that the Tong had informed them that they had slightly altered their plan and now proposed if the play continued to kill Mr. Woods. Al said that it was a lousy play anyway and he had never liked it, but a statement from Pittsburgh showing a big profit calmed him sufficiently to enable him to defy the Tongs to do their worst.

The next day letters with death heads began to arrive and as these failed to ruffle his majestic calm a voice, speaking broken English, called him on the telephone and informed him that if the play was performed even once after the following Saturday night his body would be found in the East River the following Monday. As Mr. Woods’ body is still to be found comfortably seated in his office at the Eltinge Theatre, it is not difficult to deduct his reaction to that voice—we closed.

For eight years the Stair and Havlin Circuit, as the string of popular-priced theaters that extended across the United States was called, were amazingly prosperous and in their rise, their prosperity and their decline, I should like to trace an analogy between them and the motion picture industry of the present day—in the nature of a warning and a prophecy.

During the eight years of which I am writing the average business of these theaters was definitely fixed at about three thousand five hundred dollars a week. The fluctuations of business were nominal, the people wanted our shows, just as to-day there is a fixed demand for talking pictures, not for a good picture, although already one may see evidences of discrimination on the part of the public which, I fear, the picture companies are no more prepared to gratify than we of the old popular-priced theater were in our day. All we had to do was to see that our weekly running expense came to five hundred dollars less than our share of the take—then multiply this by forty, as the houses were open forty weeks a year, and we had a profit of twenty thousand a year from each show.

During each of these years we had from seven to thirteen plays of my writing on this circuit.