It didn’t take the dry-goods people long to “get on” to the idiosyncrasies of their youthful employee, and in due course he lost his job and was cooling his heels all day long on the sidewalk, most of the time in the vicinity of the stage-door of the Howard Athenæum, then under the management of the late John Stetson.
When Stetson was putting on “Under the Gaslight,” he needed a street urchin, so he decided to give the little Dixon chap a chance to show what he could do. The child introduced a song and dance, made an instantaneous hit, and thus started on his career. His part was called Peanuts, and he was retained at the Howard for small bits with James S. Maffit and his partner, Bartholomew, in their pantomime work.
How he managed to pick up an education, with his head full of the stage, is difficult to determine; but one has only to talk with Mr. Dixey to know him for a man of keen intelligence and common sense. But his parents continued to keep him under their eye in Boston until after “Evangeline” was produced. Here he encountered his old friend, James S. Maffit, again, as the Lone Fisherman. Crane was in the cast, too, doing Le Blanc, the notary. Dixey was the forelegs of the famous Heifer, the hind ones submitting to the direction of Richard Golden. But during the tour of the famous piece Dixey did very many of the other parts in the burlesque.
In the course of the early eighties John Stetson extended his field of operations to New York, and set up a stock company at the Fifth Avenue Theater. Dixey, as one of its leading members, created Christopher Blizzard in “Confusion.”
“Adonis” and Its Successors.
In New York he fell in with William F. Gill. Dixey had some of the ideas for “Adonis.” Gill had more, and put them together in the shape of a burlesque. They tried to get Dixey’s old friend and first manager, Stetson, to bring it out at the Boston Globe. But he got cold feet on the proposition, declaring that it was too expensive to mount. Rice took it in hand, and after he had demonstrated the thing to be a success Stetson wanted an interest in it, in exchange for which he was willing to plank down twenty thousand dollars, but it was then too late.
“Adonis” ran at the Bijou in New York for more than three hundred nights, and was afterward done in London.
“The Seven Ages,” built on the same lines, was a frightful frost, if a thing can be said to be so when done in a temperature of one hundred and three degrees, which Mr. Dixey avers the thermometer registered at the old Standard in the early—and last—nights of the piece.
After “The Seven Ages”—Daly’s for Dixey, and in this connection I want to quote from an interview the actor gave to a writer for the New York Dramatic Mirror some ten years ago.
“Do you know,” he said, “that I really was the first Svengali on the stage? In ‘The Tragedy Rehearsed’ I introduced a little Trilby burlesque, where Miss Rehan was hypnotized into singing ‘Ben Bolt.’ That was the very earliest stage use of Miss O’Ferrall.