He was just a bum, a tool of the villain’s, and as it was usual to kill him along toward the middle of the second act, we never found it necessary to engage a very good actor.

These eight made up the cast and to them we added two or three utility actors to play such “walking parts” as the plot demanded, but no matter what the play these eight characters were always in it. If they hadn’t been I am sure the audience would have demanded their money back.

Scenically, these plays of ours were very elaborate. They were always in four acts and frequently with as many as five scenes in each act. CHINATOWN CHARLIE had twenty-two scenes. The mechanical dexterity demanded in writing a play of this kind was very important and an extremely difficult trick to acquire. Front scenes in the old melodramas were always flat and stupid, just as they are in the musical comedies of to-day. The expert workman let his front scenes run the exact time it took the stage carpenters to set the next scene back of it and not a moment longer, which took experience and care. It was also necessary to climax these scenes and these scene climaxes were the forerunners of the modern “blackout”—some sure-fire “belly-laugh” or bit of heroic bunk that would be sure to bring a yell of delight from the audience to cover the moment in the dark necessary to fly the drop and start the next scene.

After a time I got to be so expert in this that I could give a cue to the audience for a laugh or a yell of approval that would last just long enough to fill in the desired pause. To me the most interesting thing about these old manuscripts of mine are these “audience cues” that would be meaningless to any one who should chance to read them but were a very real and very necessary part of the play.

Just how I could have been quite serious in building these old plays I can’t at this moment quite comprehend, but the fact is that I was, just as every man who is successful in his work must be. Even the priceless line of Nellie, the well-known cloak model, was quite gravely written. Nellie was endeavoring to escape from the attentions of a very evil gentleman who from the start of the play showed signs of paying her attentions that were far from honorable. In the first act he pushed her under a descending elevator in the basement of a department store. In Act II he threw her off Brooklyn Bridge and in the third he bound her to the tracks of the elevated railroad just as a train came thundering along. In the fourth act he climbs in her bedroom window at an early hour of the morning and when both modesty and prudence force her to shrink away from him he looked at her reproachfully and said: “Why do you fear me, Nellie?”

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CHAPTER V ◆ UP FROM MELODRAMA
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About 1911 I saw the fate of the popular-priced game, and got out of it before the final crash, as did Sam Harris, Al Woods and a few of the others. I started to look about for a new way of earning my living. I had made money at the game and was in no danger from that source, but I was then, in 1910, only thirty-seven years old and had trained myself to the habit of almost constant work, a habit I have never as yet been able to break.

My name, as the author of literally hundreds of bloodthirsty melodramas, was a thing of scorn to the highbrows of the theater, used as a horrible example to young authors and to frighten bad children. The very thought of my being allowed to produce a play in a Broadway theater was quite absurd, as my friends all assured me. I kept on writing, however, for the same reason that keeps me at it now, because I love to write plays, no matter whom it hurts. For a year or two I had a tough time, but I managed to find a market among the road stars and the one night stand companies, and I wrote a few comedies and dramatized several novels. They were successful enough in the towns where they were played but were never heard of in New York. At this time, also, I developed a trick of writing plays directly for stock companies and by good salesmanship built up quite an income from this by-product. I was absolutely bound to break into the New York game and in spite of many rebuffs I kept knocking at the doors of the New York managers.