There are about a dozen men and women who mean a lot to me with whom I have worked for sixteen years to bring about decent conditions for writers. There are many more than a dozen now who are working faithfully for the Authors’ League, but often, when I attend one of the meetings and sit at the crowded council table, I catch the eye of one of the old timers and wink pleasantly—we can remember years when there weren’t enough authors around to fill the room with cigar smoke. We used to ask one another if it was worth while to keep on fighting. James Forbes always said that this was positively his last effort, but he always came back; so did the rest of us, all busy men, not one of us needing the help of any one to get decent contracts. We were proud of our calling and wanted to advance its dignity and importance, and I think that in the end our many years of hard work justified itself. The American Theatre is to-day under a temporary cloud. It may be one year or two years or three years before its old prosperity returns, but the Dramatists’ Guild is the strongest and most powerful body of writing men in the world and there are plenty of strong men of half my age who are able and willing to keep it as powerful and as sane and moderate as it is to-day. No matter what you hear don’t for a moment believe that the prosperity of our theater is not going to return,—the theater is safe and it always has been. Just so long as little boys instinctively pick up a stick and become brave knights and gallant soldiers, and as long as a girl child hugs a doll to her breast and becomes a mother, the theater will live. A combination of circumstance, novel inventions, stupidity and greed, plus lack of leadership and the arrogance of organized labor, has resulted in sad days for many of us, but the turn of the wheel is already bringing about changes and sooner than most of you are yet ready to believe better days are coming.
If, when they come, the men who have been the leaders of the commercial theater have learned their lesson, the temporary setback will have been worth what it has cost; if they haven’t, they will be forced to step aside and give up their power to those more worthy to possess it.
The sane, simple and practical way to govern the theater has been pointed out. Three times already I have served on committees whose object was to consolidate the interests of actors, managers and authors, and hand over the authority to a group of twelve, made up from the men of proved integrity among the three groups. We who have made a long study of conditions know that this composite intelligence could find a way to correct the principal evils that have been the cause of our loss of public confidence and support. Those of the public who really prefer to go to the picture houses can of course continue to go to them. Wise men of the theater know that in the end the picture houses are great incubators engaged in hatching out new audiences for us and that in a very short space of time we could have a road circuit beside which the old Stair and Havlin houses couldn’t cast a shadow.
There are, however, some very definite evils in the present state of the theater and every one of them could be corrected or greatly reduced. The regulation of the sale of tickets has been taken in hand by a progressive group of managers and will be corrected if the managers can be controlled, which is a bit like saying we could do away with evil if there was no more sin. The unfair and unwise demands of the unions of stage hands and musicians could be regulated by an honest facing of facts and a fair presentation of present conditions. No organization has the right, or as a matter of fact the power, to go beyond a clearly marked line; the moment any group’s demands become unfair there is very little difficulty in upsetting that group. It doesn’t demand an Alexander, it simply calls for a little common sense.
No one of us really wants to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs. Help from the railroads would follow an intelligent presentation of our case. Clean theaters would promptly follow in the footsteps of a clean administration. Box office reform depends upon six words spoken by the right man with the right authority to back his six words up. Help from the newspapers does not depend, I am convinced, upon the spending of millions of dollars, but would follow an honest request for their assistance based upon the ground of the theater’s cultural and educational value, always provided that we could show some claim to cultural and educational importance.
The revival of the road, until such time as the turn of the tide has made that revival automatic, could be accomplished under wise leadership that would work for, say, forty decent plays, decently produced, underwritten by local subscription lists. Any community of a hundred thousand population will furnish an audience, once they are assured that there is a certainty of their getting adult entertainment. These aren’t day dreams; everybody knows them; several times we have banded together to fight for them. The last meeting called by John Golden of the managerial group actually had a real grip on this problem, only dinner time came around and we all went home. If some one were to call a meeting of a strong group of actors, authors and managers, all instructed to sit there until they accomplished something, I am sure we would at last be under way—provided always that no lawyers be allowed at the meeting and that it be called at a good restaurant.
During my two years with the Paramount Company, my contract reserved half of my time for my own private affairs and I divided this time as honestly as I knew how between my duties to the Authors’ League and my writing. By now my son Donald had finished college and gone to Hollywood as a staff writer, and Owen had walked out on Professor Baker at Yale, horned into the theater when my back was turned and secured for himself the part of the son in THE BARKER with Dick Bennett in Chicago. This action of his, so his mother informed me, was the most dreadful calamity of modern times and would undoubtedly bring her in sorrow to the grave, but if you have ever seen her seated in an audience where this boy is a member of the cast of players, you might possibly read in her deeply absorbed face a certain smug satisfaction that would not, I am sure, make you think of either graves or calamities.
I, being of coarser stuff, never for a moment regretted the fact that these two boys of ours had insisted upon following in our footsteps; how could they do anything else? They were born of two stage-struck parents and had cut their teeth by biting managers who frequented our establishment. If a child learns anything in the home circle, how could they help learning about the theater? Their mother knows a little about things outside its range, but I know nothing else at all, not even enough to be ashamed of the fact. The great happiness of my life to-day is that as we grow older, the four of us, we grow closer together, and that I can talk with my sons of their problems with the authority of one who knows something about them.
In the fall of 1928 I wrote a play called CARRY ON with a fine part in it for young Owen. My intentions were good and I am sure he has quite forgiven me. Later he played in another of my authorship called TONIGHT AT 12, which was one of the sort of plays often described by Al Woods as “all right, but what the hell did you write it for?” In both of these, however, Owen fared better than I, and I knew that he was fairly started.
In 1928 I turned for a change to the writing of musical comedy and helped a little on WHOOPEE, produced by Ziegfeld with Eddie Cantor in the old Otto Kruger part, for WHOOPEE is an adaptation of our old friend THE NERVOUS WRECK, expertly tailored by Wm. Anthony McGuire.