“I kind of like it. Don’t understand some of the talk. The show business is changing, sonny. It’s changed a lot since nineteen fourteen. If you’d told me five years back that a piece like Redemption could have a run I’d have laughed my head off. Or that you could mount a play like Jones has fixed up this thing at the Plymouth—all low lights and—what d’you call it?—impressionist scenery.... The game’s changed.—Oh, the big money makers’ll always be hogwash, Gurdy! Don’t bet any other way. I ain’t such a fool as to think that Heaven’s opened because you can put on a piece with a sad ending and some—well, philosophy to it and have it make a little cash. No such luck. Only it’s got so now that when some big, fat wench in a lot of duds starts throwin’ his pearls back at the man that’s keepin’ her in the third act—why, there’s a lot of folks out front that say, Oh, hell, and go home. Of course, there’s a lot more that think it’s slick.—Lord, I’d like to put on ‘Measure for Measure’ when we open the Walling!—You could make that look like something.—I’ve got to find something good to open with. This kid Steve O’Mara’s sending me up a play about a thug that gets wrecked down in Cuba and steals a plantation. Ten scenes to it, he says. One of ’em’s a lot of niggers havin’ a Voodoo party. Sounds fine. I picked him up down in Greenwich village.”
“I should think all those half married ladies and near anarchists would shock you to death.”
“Bosh, brother. I don’t like ’em enough to get shocked at ’em. What’s there to get shocked at? They think so and so and I think the other way. If you took to preaching dynamite I’d be pretty worried—like I would if your mamma bobbed her hair and ran off with a tenor. I’m not an old maid just because I’m in the show business.” He lit a cigarette and added. “Fifty per cent of theatrical managers are old maids.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“Why, they are. This way. They get used to a run of plots and they can’t see outside that. For instance, here’s a dramatist—forgotten his name—was trying to sell a piece last year. I couldn’t use it but I thought it was pretty good so I sent him over to Loeffler with a note. Next day, Loeffler called me up and said I ought to be hung for the sake of public morals. This play knocked round the offices and every one thought it was awful. Why? The hero’s a chauffeur that’s tired of working, so he marries a rich old woman. It’s something that happens every other day in the papers. There ain’t a week that some fifty year old actress doesn’t marry a kid step dancer but they all carried on as if this fellow’d written a play where every one came on the stage stark naked and danced the hoochy coochee. It wasn’t a nice idea but where’s it worse than nine tenths these bedroom things or as bad?”
“Why wouldn’t you use it, Mark?”
“Oh, hell, there wasn’t but one scene and that was an interior!”
Gurdy asked, “Mark, wouldn’t you like it if the playwrights would go back to the Elizabethan idea—I mean thirty or forty scenes to a play?”
“Certainly,” said Mark, “and those bucks were right.” He sat for a little silent, scrawling his desk blotter with a pencil, then shyly laughed, “Supposing some one made a play out of my married life? What you’d call the important episodes happened all over God’s earth. Cora got me on a farm in Fayettesville, N. J., married in Hoboken. Started quarreling in Martin’s café. Caught her kissing a fellow at Longbranch. Never saw him before or since. Owned up she’d lived with three or four men in our flat—twentieth Street, New York. Big scene. God, how sick that made me! I was at tea at Mrs. LeMoyne’s when Frank Worthing got me off in a corner and told me about her and Jarvis Hope. I was sittin’ in the bath tub when she chucked her curling irons at me and said she was through. That’s the way things go. Shakespeare was right. Crazy? No.—Come in.” His secretary brought Mark a thick manuscript lettered “Captain Salvador: Stephen O’Mara.” and withdrew. Mark went on, “But my married life wouldn’t make much of a show—green kid from the country and a—a Cora Boyle. Pretty ordinary.” He reflected, “But I don’t know. It’s always going to be pretty tragic for a kid to find out he’s married a girl thinkin’ she was pure—as pure as folks are, anyhow—and finds she hadn’t been. Wasn’t her fault, of course. Started acting when she was fourteen. Awful jolt, though. She lied about it, too. She was the damnedest liar! I hate liars. Well run along and play squash or something, sonny. I want to see what O’Mara’s handed me.”
He bought the rights to “Captain Salvador” two hours later. Gurdy was willing to rejoice with him after he read the Cuban tragedy. Carlson yapped, “The women’ll hate it, Mark. Where’s your clothes?”