I was indifferent. Let fate decide. Fate, however, had pretty well decided as I was never, as we say in Hollywood, “just the type” for romantic juveniles, having always been about the same distance around as I was up and down, and so I made a final decision to attack as a dramatist. And when I say that in the thirty odd years since then I have had more fun than any man in the world, I am prepared to defend my boast against doubters either on foot or on horseback. If life has taught me anything at all, it is that round pegs belong in round holes and that the one great happiness is to be doing the thing one loves to do.
Fanny Janauschek as Medea. “The last of the really great actors of the romantic school.”
(From the Messmore Kendall Collection)
Lawrence Barrett as Count Lanciotto in Francesca da Rimini
(From the Messmore Kendall Collection)
Twelve dollars is not a large capital for an unknown boy, quite without friends, thrown upon his own resources in New York, and I am willing to admit that at fifty-six I should scream with terror at what at twenty-two seemed to me to be a glorious adventure.
A. M. Palmer was at that time one of the leading New York managers and after many attempts I succeeded in persuading him to read a play I had written. Fortunately no copy of this drama remains in existence. It was, according to my vague memory, a very terrible affair. But Mr. Palmer, who was a sort of Christopher Columbus of his time, seemed to discover in it some germ of promise, and as in spite of some months of experience I still found it difficult to live without eating, he offered to make me an actor until such time as I was able to live by writing. He put me with an all-star cast supporting Madame Janauschek, the last of the really great tragic actors of the romantic school.
This company contained such well-known artists as Blanche Walsh, W. H. Thompson, Annie Yeamans, Fred Bond, Orin Johnstone, Joseph Whiting, George C. Boniface, Sr., and many others, and opened in rather a bad melodrama called THE GREAT DIAMOND ROBBERY, a vehicle quite unworthy of the really great talents of Janauschek who was, in some ways, the finest actress I have ever known. She had been a friend of the very great in Europe, and had come so near to being an actual queen that much of the manner of royalty still clung to her. When I knew her she was short and dumpy and old but in her presence one had the feeling of the latent power and fire of this remarkable woman and a sense of the pity and irony of her slow decay.
My duties as a member of her company had at least the spice of variety, as I played five parts in the play, was assistant stage manager and had the added privilege of sitting at the gallery door for an hour before each performance to count the number of persons who entered, as it was a playful custom of the day for the owner of the theater to sell about twice as many gallery tickets as were found in the box when the count was made. For these duties I was rewarded by the rather small salary of twelve dollars a week, and although twelve dollars went further in those days than they do now, they never seemed quite to reach from one Saturday night to the next one.
I played with this company for its run in New York and continued with it for a long road season. The road in those days took in all of the principal towns of the country and, as Janauschek was an established favorite, we did a good business everywhere. My twelve dollars a week that probably wouldn’t pay for a room to-day was with a little stretching enough for a decent living, although by the end of each week I was driven to borrowing the morning papers for the want of the two cents necessary to purchase them.