I can best explain the change that twenty years had brought by telling of an experience I had with a play called DRIFTWOOD. I wrote this play in 1905 and read it to a famous star of that time; the lady liked the part and urged her manager to produce the play, but after long reflection he decided against it on the grounds that the heroine of my play had made in her youth what the French writers so politely describe as “a slip,” and in his experience it was out of the question that any audience could ever be willing for her, no matter how deep her repentance, to marry a decent man. Twenty years after I dug this old faded manuscript out of a trunk and was struck by some scenes of what seemed to me to be of real power and truth, and again I took it to a great woman star, whose verdict was “It didn’t seem to her to be about anything worth making such a fuss about.” And she was as right in her opinion as the manager of the old days had been in his.
After the production of THE DETOUR I attacked my work from a slightly different point of view, and my next job was the very pleasant one of making for my old friend, William A. Brady, the American adaptation of THE INSECT COMEDY, which was produced as THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. I followed this with ICEBOUND, which won for me the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and caused me to be selected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
I had some adventures with ICEBOUND before I got it on the stage and got myself into a terrible mess that grew deeper as its success grew more assured. David Belasco had seen THE DETOUR and had written me that if I could write another play as good he would gladly produce it at once. I sent him the manuscript of ICE BOUND as soon as I completed it, and in a few days had a telegram from him saying that he liked it very much and asked me to see Mr. Roder, his manager, and arrange the details of a contract. The next day I called on Ben Roder, whom I had known for many years, and he offered me a contract containing a clause giving Mr. Belasco the right to produce the play at any time during the next two years. Mr. Belasco was away with David Warfield’s production of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and Mr. Roder was a bit impatient of my objection to the clause I have mentioned. I have always been in a hurry all my life, and I had caught from Al Woods during my long association with him his ardent desire to see a play on the stage the very moment he falls in love with it. Neither yesterday nor to-morrow ever meant very much to me; to-day has always been the right time to produce any play that I had faith in. This fact is so well known to the men with whom I do business that it is no longer necessary for me to tell them that if they want to do a play of mine at all they must start casting it the very hour after they have first read it. Mr. Roder, however, was not quite used to my rather stormy manner, and the result of our talk was an angry outburst on my part.
“Mr. Belasco,” I said, “will give me a contract before noon on Monday for an immediate production or he can’t have the play.” Such language is all out of line in the Belasco office, and Mr. Roder smiled a kindly and tolerant smile as I walked out of his office, merely remarking that he didn’t think I was quite crazy enough to turn down a Belasco production. I have always been a free lance in the theater and perhaps a bit militant in my stand for an author’s rights and his prerogatives, and I made up my mind to go through with my bluff unless Mr. Belasco came to my terms. On Monday I would sell my play to some one else. With this in view I took all four of my remaining manuscripts under my arm, and by noon I had placed three of them with managers of good standing, in each case saying that the play must be purchased by Monday noon or not at all, in each case walking out of the office followed by an exact duplicate of Mr. Roder’s tolerant but unbelieving smile.
It was noon and I was hungry, so, with my remaining manuscript tucked into my overcoat pocket, I dropped into the grill room of the old Knickerbocker Hotel for lunch. During lunch young Max Gordon, whom I had known since his boyhood, sat down for a moment at my table for a friendly chat. Max Gordon and Al Lewis had been successful vaudeville agents and had recently owned interests in several plays, but as yet had made no productions under their own names. Max was always of an inquiring turn of mind and very little escapes him. One glance at the yellow envelope sticking out of my overcoat pocket was enough.
“How’s your new play?” was his first start. His second was to calmly stretch out his hand and take my last manuscript out of my pocket and transfer it to his own. “I’d like to read it,” he blandly observed, and in spite of some protest on my part he walked out of the room with it in his pocket. I had already covered the three managers who, aside from Mr. Belasco, had seemed to me to be best fitted to produce this play and I went home. The next day being Saturday, I went up to St. Andrews for my usual week-end game of golf with my golfing partner, Bob Davis, Bob being no blood kin of mine but a very dear friend of many years’ standing. Sunday morning the bell of my apartment rang and Mr. Max Gordon walked calmly in and dropped a thousand dollars on my table and blandly announced that “we are going to produce ICEBOUND.” Questioned as to the “we” part of it he replied that Sam Harris and Al Lewis had read the play and that Mr. Harris had offered to put it out under his trade mark with Lewis and Gordon as silent but active partners. Sam Harris could then, as he could now, have anything of mine he wanted, so I promptly shook hands and called it a trade.
Then the storm broke. By ‘phone, by letter and by telegram every one of the managers whom I had given until Monday noon to buy my play sent messages that they would produce it, and it took me about five years to square myself.
As a matter of fact I have never been able to see the justice in the trade custom of never submitting a play to more than one manager at a time. If I own a house and want to sell it, I give that house to more than one agent, and the grocer who displays a particularly fine melon on his stand doesn’t consider it the property of the first customer who admires it. Before it’s anybody’s but his some one must pay good money for it. Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes.
ROBERT H. DAVIS
(Photo by F. X. Cleary)